Honoured to have a member of our Intl Scientific Advisory Board in Australia this week. Prof Brenda Andrews from the Univ of Toronto (pictured right) delivered an invited talk at the Lorne Genome Conference and caught up with our Chief Investigator Traude Beilharz, president of the Conference Board.

That's a wrap for Lorne Genome 2026! Thanks to all the speakers for fascinating talks, poster presenters for hot of the press science, trade for making the experiments possible and of course all the attendees for great discussion. See you next year!

Congratulations to winners of the Lorne Genome Best Student Poster Prizes: Jessica Hawes, Sarah Berent, David Neville, Sandeep Kum and Andrea Daner!

Could @lornegenome.bsky.social be the MOST Aussie genomics conference?

Last day of #Lornegenome. A great venue, cool talks and discussions. Learnt about diversification of mammalian genomes, inheritance of mutations and impact of mutagens, how TFs direct chromatin organisation and so much more. New collaborations, new projects, can’t wait til next year

2026 Winner of the Lorne Genome Julian Wells Medal: Christine Wells (no relation!) @stemcellsystems.bsky.social congratulations, well deserved!!

Almost literally too late, but here is a feed for BlueSky to collate #LorneGenome posts that blends mentions of Lorne + Genome along with posts from @lornegenome.bsky.social Should still work next year though! bsky.app/profile/did:...

Journeying back in time with Liran Carmel: reconstructing Neanderthal methylation. Found regions with different methylation to humans: genes that affect the face and voice.

Jennifer Zenker showing how pluripotent cells have unique microtubule organisation and its asymmetries direct fate decisions

We’ve been spoiled with lovely weather & quality science at @lornegenome.bsky.social this year, continuing this morning with Session 11 (Novel Approaches to Study the Genome) & then the Julian Wells Medallist presentation. Hope everyone has rested up after the dinner! See you 9am! #LorneGenome2026

Lorne Genome Conference dinner with a few party crashers

And welcome to the conference dinner! 🍻

Jenny Tung: Marrying evolutionary ecology and evolutionary genetics to link traits leading to differential survival with changes in allele frequency across generations using the cutest model organism: the meerkat

Hazuki Takahashi: are RNA DNA 🧬 interactions cell type specific in humans? Develop RADICL-seq to map RNA-DNA interactions. Capture both cis and trans interactions, showing cell type specific interactions

Transposable elements move DNA around genome, creating new genes BUT also a mutagen causing disease ☯️ Keith Slotkin has harnessed this mechanism to target DNA inserts to 🌿🫛 genomes. Have used synthetic biology to improve targeting from industry standard of 1% to >99% while reducing off target sites

90% Small Cell Lung Cancer🫁 is immune silent and evades immunotherapy , but there is plasticity between immune active / silent types. Marian Burr seeks to regulate this transition for improved SCLC survival.

Austen Ganley does a random genome project: puts A.thaliana DNA into human cells. Gets transcription that is independent of A. Thailana genes.

Can only tag @antobeck.bsky.social here on BlueSky to say that the #Illumina coffee cart is once again the quiet hero of #LorneGenome

@jennbrophy.bsky.social gives a beautiful talk uncovering the regulation of lateral root development, creating tools to engineer root branches 🌱

Brenda Andrews: yeast 🥪 a fantastic systemic genetics, all viable deletion mutants are available. Using to map genetic interactions ➡️ link phenotype to genotype

Thanks to Roche for bringing out @joepdel.bsky.social from Hartwig Medical to share his work using Roche-SBX for Paired Tumour–Normal Whole Genome Sequencing on their cohorts.

Up now Hongpei Li @singmolsci.bsky.social, winner of #lornegenome best student abstract! Telling us how p16 and polycomb interact to cause irreversible growth arrest and cell cycle exit.

Peter Cockerill's first Lorne Genome talk was in 1993! Back telling us about how chromatin priming allows faster reactivation of immune response genes in Memory T Cells.

Alexey Terskikh @perkinsinstitute.bsky.social shows us how epigentic change in the inner hair cells of the cochlear occur in a spatial fashion and is predictive of age.

Petra Hajkova @imperialcollegeldn.bsky.social germ cells are depleted for lamins compared to somatic cells but pericentric heterochromatin still anchors to the periphery via H3K9me, in a similar fashion to ancestral 3D organisation that occurs in c. elegans.

Ferdinand von Meyenn @imps-ethzurich.bsky.social is there metabolic memory im adipose tissue? Sampling from patients post bariatric surgery retain an obesity signature in their adipose cells post weight loss.

Bing Zhu kicking off today by taking us through the mysteries of heterochromatin.

Good morning Lorne! Hope you are enjoying another beautiful morning before we begin with our Epigentics and Chromatin session at 9am

It’s another beautiful morning in Lorne, with blue skies & kangaroos. Highs of 33 degrees & afternoon rain/thunderstorms are predicted, but it will be cool & dry in the @lornegenome.bsky.social Heritage Ballroom for Session 7: Epigenetics & Chromatin at 9am. Looking forward to it! #LorneGenome2026

Directed cell fate reprogamming is holy grail for regenerative medicine. Katherine Zyner created Refate to identify small molecules that can be used to convert cells between states. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Upon birth we have to switch from g to b globin 🩸 for effective oxygen uptake. Mitchell Weiss takes us through developmental regulation of globin genes and how insights have led to dev of therapeutic gene therapies for haemoglobinopathies. Challenge: personalised therapies are expensive

Michael Gandal genetic architecture of ASD and schizophrenia: GWAS studies have discovered 100s of loci influencing both disorders, current challenge is how do we interpret their role in disease? Colocalisation of psychiatric loci w cis EQTLs only explains 20%. What about isoforms??

Matthew Stephens introduces us to the wild world of matrix factorisation MF. Genomics has big datasets we want to simplify. What makes factors more interpretable? PCA can give different results to (non neg) NMF because it can have neg weights, but this makes PCA factors less interpretable than NMF.

Somatic mutations can drive disease, but hard to distinguish from technical error. Rhys Gillman introduces SCARCE: Single-Cell Analysis of Rare Clonal Events which blends scDNA seq with surface markers to find clonal variants in specific cell types www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.30.685685v1

MND Motor Neuron Disease is associated with disregulated splicing caused by TDP43 dysfunction. Natalie Grima integrates long and short read data to identify aberrent splicing in the cerebellum dss.niagads.org/datasets/ng0...

Andrew Lonsdale @petermaccc.bsky.social showcases LemonSplice 🍋 to try to answer the question of what does the mess of splice junctions 🧩 even mean? Shiny interface that visualises, quantifies novelty and links to published findings.

Spatial transcriptomics methods can struggle to scale on large datasets, or miss biological structure. Nora Liu @saigenci.bsky.social introduces DOMINO, a diffusion optimised contrastive learning framework for spatial domain detection, an accurate and scalable ST method.

Woo Jun Shim from UQ uses epigenomes of epigentic marks to create Epigenetic Comodulated Programs (EpiCops) to help provide functional interpretation of GWAS hits.

Waruni Abeysekera @wehi-research.bsky.social shows gene sets are contain intergene corrélation but gene permutation testing dusrupts this, inflating results, including in Fast GSEA (Gene Set Enrichment Analysis). Describes CAMERA which controls the false discovery rate better.

Tongtong Wang @petermaccc.bsky.social kicking off the computational Biology parallel session introducing EmbryoRadar, a machine learning model to identify developmental programs reactivated in cancer.

The neurodevelopmental disorder Tatton-Brown-Rahman Syndrome is caused by defects in DNMT3A, but critical brain development continues after birth. Hannah Vanyai @wehi-research.bsky.social explores whether anti sense oligonucleotide intervention in the post natal window can reduce symptoms.

Why do some obese people remain metabolically healthy and others develop disease? Isabel Reinisch @ethz.ch teases out genetic factors separating these groups.

Alex Hewitt @utas.edu.au takes #lornegenome through genetic drivers of glaucoma, making use of large biobanks, showing high predictive rates for glaucoma polygenic risk scores compared to other common diseases.

Duncan Odom takes #lornegenome on a wild ride through lesion segregation showing repair of DNA damage can be strand resolved.

Choose your own adventure @lornegenome.bsky.social Duncan Odom www.lifepi-hd.com/duncan-odom asks if we want greatest hits or new hot stuff - role on hot stuff!

Good morning @lornegenome.bsky.social delegates! In case you missed watching the sunrise on the beach this morning (with galahs!), I’m happy to report that today we have a forecast of blue skies, highs of 31 degrees & some great science, kicking off with @odomlab.bsky.social at 9am. #LorneGenome2026

Up now @hannah-coughlan.bsky.social Hannah Coughlan of @wehi-research.bsky.social #Lornegenome Millenium Prize Winner talking about her work on the 3D organisation of the genome in immune cells

The @lornegenome.bsky.social 2026 Millennium Science award to mid career researchers to acknowledge outstanding contributions to Australian genomic research, including novel analytical concepts. #LorneGenome Congratulations Hamid Alinejad-Rokny (UNSW) and Hannah Coughlan (WEHI)

Congratulations to Hamid Alinejad Rokny from UNSW for his #lornegenome Millenium Prize! He shares with us his work on AI in Biology, especially transcriptomics.

Up next #Lornegenome @lornegenome.bsky.social Millenium Prize Awards for Mid Career Investigators!! 2026 winners are @hannah-coughlan.bsky.social Hannah Coughlan @wehi-research.bsky.social and Hamid Alinejad Rokny! Congratulations and on to their talks!