We are pleased to announce that Drs. Arang Rhie and Sergey Koren, from the Center for Genomics and
Data Science Research at the National Institutes of Health, have agreed to conduct an in-person hands-
on workshop on inspecting and resolving genome assembly graphs in conjunction with the Advances in
Genome Biology and Technology Agriculture conference (AGBT-Ag) in Phoenix on Sunday, April 14, 7-9
pm (following the RCN workshop). The workshop will be organized by Drs. Brenda Murdoch and Ben
Rosen, and requires registration for the conference at www.agbt.org. 

Resolving assembly graphs is an important component of generating full haplotype separated diploid or
polyploid assemblies in animals or plants, and particularly important in the context of “complete”
telomere-to-telomere (T2T) assembly. The Ruminant T2T project aims to generate T2T assemblies of
cetartiodactyla species and other species that can generate the appropriate data types but the graph
resolution step is a manual process and additional trained personnel would be beneficial to speed
progress and accelerate other T2T efforts.

The training will cover evaluating assembly graphs in bandage, resolving tangles that are amenable to
manual resolution, and generating assemblies with resolved sequence. Some easy and difficult graphs
will be examined during the two hour workshop. We are very grateful that Arang and Sergey are willing
to develop this tutorial and provide their expertise.

Please email Kelsey McClure at kelsey.mcclure@usda.gov if you want to attend the workshop by March
5, so that we can make sure we can accommodate the number of interested participants. If you hope to
attend but do not know if you will be able to by that deadline, please go ahead and email with a
statement to that effect.