Upcoming events hosted by or involving Genetics Otago will be listed here. Please check back regularly for updates. A calendar of events that may be of interest to our members can be found at the bottom of this page and in the sidebar of other pages on this site, please note that this includes events hosted outside of Genetics Otago.
GO Annual Symposium
Genetics Otago has partnered with the Australasian Epigenetics Alliance to bring the AEpiA Conference to NZ for the first time, held 1st – 5th December 2024. The GO Symposium will begin with a shared session with the AEpiA delegates on the morning of the 5th of December and will then continue in its regular format for the remainder of the day.
As usual, the Symposium will highlight the fantastic research being done by GO members from around the country through presentations, posters and awards.
Date: Thursday 5th December 2024
Time: 9:00 am – 5:00 pm
Venue: Hutton Theatre, Otago Museum (for those joining from Christchurch and Wellington – a venue will be confirmed soon).
Programme
A draft programme will be available here soon.
Registration
Registration for this event is now open via the button below.
Abstract submission is part of the registration process, all abstracts must be submitted by no later than 5:00 pm on the 14th of November. Registration will close at 12:00 noon on Wednesday 20th November. Please keep the link provided at the end of your registration to make changes to your responses up until the closing date.
Registration Fee
Due to budget constraints, we will be charging a $50 per person registration fee for all attendees to subsidise the costs associated with the Symposium. We have received confirmation that this registration fee can be paid from S accounts, and if you are in a position to make a donation on top of this fee, we would gladly receive it. However, we do not want the payment to be a barrier to attendance, so if you are not in a position to make a payment, please contact us go@otago.ac.nz.
Payment Methods
Payments from an S account (or other University account) can be journaled to Genetics Otago account GL.10.LH.A14.2541 via your finance associate. Please include the surname(s) of the registrants that the payment covers in the narration.
If you need to make payment using funds from outside the University this can be arranged via the Cashier’s Office. Please contact us for details (go@otago.ac.nz).
Awards
The Annual Genetics Otago Awards including The Genetics Otago Award, Outstanding Mentor Awards, Student Supervisor Award, Publication Awards, Poster Awards and Science Communication Prize will be presented at the conclusion of the Symposium and nominations for these are now open.
Award nominations close at 12:00 noon on Wednesday 20th November (except for Poster and Science Communication Awards which are at 5 pm 14th of November) and should be submitted by email to go@otago.ac.nz.
Full details of the awards can be found here: Award Details.
Oxford Nanopore Technology Workshop
Join us at Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka, Dunedin, for a one day Oxford Nanopore Technology symposium. This event, jointly hosted by Genomics Aotearoa and the Genetics Otago ONT hub, will feature research talks highlighting different ONT use cases, a technical sequencing demonstration and an EPI2ME workshop.
This is an in-person event being held on Friday, December 6th at the Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka / University of Otago campus.
Registration for this event is free of charge.
This event is sponsored by ONT, and is supported by the Otago Genomics Facility.
Contact tyler.mcinnes@otago.ac.nz for any queries.
CRISPR Workshop
Details coming soon. Proposed date: 6th December.
Calendar of Events
The below is a calendar of events hosted by GO as well as events hosted by others that may be of interest to our members. If you have an event you would like us to include please contact us here.
Nanopore Day, Queenstown 2023
Date: Thursday 31st August 2023
Venue: Queenstown, New Zealand
Time: 9:00 – 17:00
Hear about the latest technical updates for Oxford Nanopore Technologies as well as talks from local scientists about their latest work using nanopore technology.
There will also be an opportunity to submit questions throughout the talks, which will be answered in the Q&A sessions following each presentation.
Please note that this is an in-person event.
There is no delegate fee for this event, but registration is required at https://nanoporetech.com/event/NanoporeDayQueenstown
Your place at this event will be confirmed via email from events@nanoporetech.com.
Schedule available here: https://nanoporetech.com/event/NanoporeDayQueenstown
The Environmental Microbiomes team at Genomics Aotearoa is hosting the annual Metagenomics Summer School once more.
This practical, hands-on workshop focuses on prokaryotic metagenomics. It aims to guide learners through the process of analysing metagenomic sequence data, from metagenomic read sequences to curated metagenome-assembled genomes paired with downstream data analyses and visualisation in R. It also includes the following lessons:
Introduction to Bash shell and scripting (pre-workshop session)
Pragmatic considerations during experiment/sampling planning and decision-making (e.g., how much sequence data do I need? What are the approaches to analysing the data I have?)
Best practices in handling and processing metagenomic data
Viral genome prediction from metagenomic assemblies
This in-person workshop will be held at the University of Auckland, City Campus, from 5th to 8th September 2023. See our Metagenomics Summer School poster.
We invite learners of all bioinformatics skill levels to register their interest here.
Jian Sheng Boey
Genomics Aotearoa Bioinformatics Training Coordinator
jian.sheng.boey@auckland.ac.nz
Join the Malacological Society of Australasia on September 7th, from 12 to 1:40pm (New Zealand time) for an enlightening open online symposium on molecular tools applied to molluscs! We will hear from AP Claudio González Wevar, AP Felipe Aguilera, and DP Hamish Spencer on the application of these tools to very different aspects of malacology. The symposium is free of change, just RSVP to receive a Zoom link. More information can be found on our website.
This online workshop is hosted by Genomics Aotearoa and NeSI and is for New Zealand researchers interested in progressing their skills with the R programming language.
This is an intermediate workshop, please check you meet the prerequisites: Attendees must have introductory knowledge of R and be well versed in tidyverse (Intro to R + supplementary materials in that workshop). We expect that you will either have completed our Introduction to R workshop or have sufficient experience of your own.
Some of the topics covered in the workshop are:
- Introduction to relational data and the join function.
- Working with regular expressions and functions from the stringr package.
- Writing custom functions, working with conditional statements.
- ‘Defensive programming’.
- Iterations – for loops, and map_*() functions.
- The importance of data structure in R.
Setup: This is a fully online, hands-on workshop. This workshop material will be run on the NeSI High Performance Computing (HPC) platforms – there is no need to install any software for this workshop. Instructions on how to access the NeSI HPC service will be sent out with the confirmation letter to registrants.
Participants must have their own laptops and plan to participate actively. You will require a working web browser.
This online workshop is hosted by Genomics Aotearoa and NeSI, and is for New Zealand researchers interested in progressing their abilities with Shell.
This workshop will include:
- An overview of the Shell, UNIX and Linux.
- Downloading data from a remote source and checking data integrity.
- Recap navigating files and directories, and commands used in routine tasks.
- Inspecting and manipulating data, part 1 (the head, less, grep, and sed commands).
- Inspecting and manipulating data, part 2 (using awk and bioawk to process text).
- Automating file processing.
- Challenges: solve example molecular biology problems using shell scripts.
This workshop assumes some familiarity with Shell. You will need to be able to do the following tasks via command line:
- Navigating files and directories.
- An understanding of full versus relative paths.
- Working with files and directories (examining files, creating, copying, moving and removing).
- Use a command line-based text editor such as nano.
And have a basic understanding of:
- File/directory permission in Linux.
- For loops (preferred, not required).
If you lack the above skills, you can use these sites as a refresher – Introduction to Command Line Carpentries lesson https://datacarpentry.org/shell-genomics/
Setup: This is a fully online, hands-on workshop. The workshop material will be run on the NeSI High Performance Computing (HPC) platforms – there is no need to install any software for this workshop. Instructions on how to access the NeSI HPC service will be sent out with the confirmation letter to registrants one week prior to the workshop.
You can view the workshop material, including the objectives and content, here: https://genomicsaotearoa.github.io/shell-for-bioinformatics/
Participants must have their own machine to work on and plan to participate actively in the workshop. You will require a working web browser.
Prof Kennerson is a Professor of Neurogenetics/Neurosciences with the ANZAC Research Institute, Sydney Local Health District (SLHD) and the School of Medical Sciences, University of Sydney, Australia. She heads the Translational Gene Discovery and Functional Genomics Inherited Peripheral Neuropathies Program at the ANZAC Research Institute. Her team has discovered several neuropathy genes and is doing pioneering research to investigate the role of structural variation and its role in new disease mechanisms for hereditary neuropathies. Her research program includes functional studies for recent gene (ATP7A and PDK3) and SV mutation (CMTX3 and DHMN1) discoveries using induced pluripotent stem cell derived motor neurons and animal models (C. elegans). Marina is a board member of the Charcot-Marie-Tooth and Related Neuropathies Consortium (CMTR), Chair of the Asian Oceanic Inherited Neuropathy Consortium (AOINC) serves on the Scientific Advisory Board of the CMT Research Foundation, USA and is Deputy Director (Research) of the SLHD Institute of Precision Medicine and Bioinformatics.
We warmly invite you to attend our Genomics Aotearoa seminar, online on Friday, October 13 at 3pm.
We welcome Dr Gabriel Gasque (Head of Outreach, protocols.io) to talk about the power of sharing detailed methods – credit, preservation, and reproducibility.
Please invite colleagues to join our genomics community and take part in this seminar. Look forward to seeing you there. Questions and discussions are welcome.
Join from PC, Mac, iOS, or Android:
https://otago.zoom.us/j/97097442106?pwd=RlczU3VCdFBmbmt4Yng4VW5OcHdSdz09
About Gabriel
Dr Gabriel Gasque is an advocate of open science and experimental reproducibility and integrity. With more than 10 years of experience in the field, Gabriel is an expert in scientific dissemination, communication and publication.
Gabriel currently serves as Head of Outreach at protocols.io, a technology company whose goals are to foster scientific advancement through collaboration between researchers and promote transparency, reproducibility, integrity, and experimental accountability through the sharing and publication of detailed research protocols. Before joining protocols.io, Gabriel was a senior editor and team manager at PLOS Biology, the flagship journal of the Public Library of Science (PLOS).
Gabriel earned his PhD in Biochemistry from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and was awarded the Weizmann Prize from the Mexican Academy of Sciences for the best doctoral thesis in 2006. He conducted postdoctoral research at Columbia University and the Rockefeller University in the United States, as a Latin American PEW fellow.”
World-leading CRISPR-Cas researcher, Prof. Dr. Chase Beisel, is visiting the Department of Microbiology and Immunology on a Chaffer fellowship. He will be giving a seminar on October 15th from 1-2 pm in Biochemistry BIG13. Please see the attached flyer for details on this presentation.
SEMINAR: Understanding Reproduction and Development in Honeybees
Tēnā koutou katoa
We warmly invite you to attend our Genomics Aotearoa seminar, online on Friday, October 27 at 3pm.
We welcome Georgia Cullen (University of Otago) to talk about Understanding Reproduction and Development in Honeybees.
Please invite colleagues to join our genomics community and take part in this seminar. Look forward to seeing you there. Questions and discussions are welcome.
Join from PC, Mac, iOS, or Android:
https://otago.zoom.us/j/97097442106?pwd=RlczU3VCdFBmbmt4Yng4VW5OcHdSdz09
About Georgia
Georgia is in the last six months of her PhD at the University of Otago, working with Professor Peter Dearden investigating honeybee reproduction and development, with a particular focus on the germline cell niche in queens.
