The best session at AGBT was on Saturday afternoon, Future Horizons in Genome Exploration (chaired by my boss Elaine Mardis). It started with an entertaining talk by Stephan Schuster about the mammoth genome. Mammoths are about as close to modern-day elephants as humans are to chimps. John Leamon from RainDance Technologies gave a talk on their very cool microfluidics platform, complete with cool movies (yes, movies not animations). The session ended with a presentation by Pacific Biosciences Founder and CTO Stephen Turner about their single molecule, real time sequencing platform. Think about sequencing an entire human genome to tenfold redundancy in a matter of hours. That’s a lot of data to analyze and store.