I’m about to hop a plane to Marco Island for the Advances in Genome Biology & Technology meeting. The media and blog policy there is pretty friendly; unless otherwise specified by the presenter, everything at AGBT is public knowledge and welcome to be blogged, tweeted, or what have you. Speaking of which, I set up a new Twitter feed for Massgenomics to provide quick, short updates on some of the sessions where I don’t have time for an in-depth post.

In addition to the scientific sessions, I’ll keep you posted on the latest from Illumina, Roche, Caliper (now part of PerkinElmer), Complete Genomics, and other big players in the sequencing world. I’m particularly looking forward to presentations from Oxford Nanopore, who earlier this month promised to have a commercial instrument available in 2012. Some of the questions I hope to answer:

• Which is better: IonTorrent PGM or Illumina MiSeq?
• What’s the current product quality and sequencing backlog of Complete Genomics?
• Should I start saying “Roche” instead of “Illumina”?
• Is there a future in 454 sequencing?
• Exome kits: Are researchers leaning toward Nimblegen, Agilent, or Illumina?
• Who’s got a real shot at the $1,000 genome this year?
• Is this genome-in-a-day thing realistic, or pie-in-the-sky?

This much I promise: I’ll squeeze in every session possible. I’ll be talking to people on and off the record. I will ask my trademark difficult questions after technology presentations that are dodged by the presenters. Unauthorized photos of new instruments will be attempted.

So please, register to follow me by e-mail and sign up for the Twitter feed. And drop me an e-mail (dkoboldt at genome dot wustl dot edu) if you’ll be there and would like to meet, either again or for the first time.

Wish me luck!