I'm very lucky to
have attended two fantastic immunology conferences this year: the
Keystone Systems
Immunology conference, hosted at Big Sky in Montana, USA, and the
Next
Gen Immunology conference at the Weizmann Institute in Israel. I
don't want to go into the details of either conference in any great
depth (as frankly the standard of both was so high any thorough
recounting would shortly turn into just a complete retelling of each
event), but I thought it might be nice to recount a few of my
impressions and recollections.
The Systems
Immunology meeting was my first Keystone, fitting what I understand
to be the regular format; talks in the morning and late afternoon,
with a gap over lunch to allow people to sneak off to the slopes.
This definitely seemed to be the strategy of a healthy proportion of
the attendees - even a ski-novice like me managed to make it up there
once or twice!
The Next Gen
Immunology conference was a day shorter, but felt like a longer event
by merit of absolutely jam-packing the talks and events in! I'm not
sure that I've ever been to a busier conference, with talks running
from before nine in the morning to past seven in the evening (albeit
with a number of breaks to allow consumption of excessive amounts of
coffee, even by general science standards). It also had the slickest
branding of any conference I've ever been to, complete with it's own
celebrity-filled introductory video (which was originally emailed
round but has sadly now been made
private!).
There were some
interesting thematic differences between the conferences, despite
having somewhat similar stated scopes. The Keystone talks were
seemingly linked mostly in their approaches, displaying a fine array
of highly-quantitative, systems level experiments. There was a
definite emphasis on the single-cell technologies; it seemed that
rare was the talk that wasn't
employing at least either
single-cell RNA-seq or 40-odd colour mass cytometry. The
NGI talks on the other hand
were much more diverse in terms of techniques employed, but converged
more on the
general area of research, which was
the microbiome and the mucosal immune response.
Another observation
that ticked me was the difference in plotting standards between the
two conferences. At the Systems meeting, with (I think it's fair to
say) a greater influence or prevalence of mathematical and
computational backgrounds, there was a definite enrichment of LaTeX
produced slides, and ggplot produced plots, whereas Prism and Excel
were far more common in Israel. There was even a fairly large
smattering of talks using comic
sans, which came as a bit of surprise.
All together, I've
kicked off the year with some fantastic science. I've ticked off a
number of speakers that I've been wanting to hear for years –
including Ron Germaine, Rick Flavell and David Baltimore – and
added a few more to the list of stories I need to hear more from,
like Aviv Regev's incredible bulk tumour scRNA-seq data, or the
wonderful things that Ton Schumacher can do with T-cells.
Crucially, I also
heard a little bit about the growing story of assembling T-cell
receptor sequences out of scRNA-seq data (to be the topic of a future
post I feel), which brings us to the shallows of one of the major
goals of repertoire research; getting paired clonotype and phenotype
in one fell swoop.
