AGBT21: A Few Pre-Conference Mutterings

Getting some miscellanea out before AGBT21 starts later this morning

1. It would have been clever of me to note in my piece on AGBT & Spatial 'omics that the conference is front-loaded with a number of spatial talks
2. Judging from the titles (or looking up the research program for those who didn't submit a title), the conference plenary is going to be nearly entirely about mice, humans and SARS-CoV-2.  Not that those aren't important, but I've always enjoyed a serious soupçon  of other topics mixed in.  There's a talk on the evolution of spider silks that bucks the trend and we can hold up hope that Jef Boeke will talk about yeast -- perhaps completion of the rewritten genome? -- in his untitled bit.  Detlev Arendt apparently works on evolution of the nervous system so perhaps that will also deliver something invertebrate. 
3. I'm also missing the session devoted to emerging technologies, where we got to hear some of the first whispers of spatial work as well as early takes on completely out there sequencing technologies.  A flash talk from Armonica on using Raman spectroscopy for sequencing seems to be the only plenary; there is a poster session on Tuesday labeled Technology Development.  But still missing a grouped set of talks on what might be dominating the meeting late this decade..
4. I hope the organizers don't regret not sending out the login credentials until Monday morning -- they could have had the whole weekend to spread the load out and discover many of the glitches
5. On that same vein, having some of the other conference features live on the preceding weekend -- the networking and at least seeing poster abstracts -- would have captured a touch of the in person conference
6. In the agenda, it would be very helpful to have a visual cue as to which day something is! Scroll down the list and it is easy to lose track of "11:30-12:30" is on Tuesday?  Wednesday??  I'm a disaster at calendars as it is; this is not helping

Well, time to catch some Zzzzs.  I will try to write about much of the conference, but not actually being away from work (well, home)  makes it harder to ignore my usual duties and meetings.  To top it off, I must attend to some personal business that couldn't be rescheduled on Wednesday afternoon, so I'll miss Illumina's talk.  I'm not expecting anything earth shattering from that, but if it does happen I probably won't be able to watch the recording until Thursday - -but feel free to send me spoilers!