BG24 & BGA24 Round Up

October marks a special time for Biodiversity Genomics. The global #BG24 community comes together at the annual Biodiversity Genomics Conference and Biodiversity Genomics Academy hosted by The Wellcome Sanger Institute, Darwin Tree of Life project, and The Earth BioGenome Project. 

BG24, held from October 28th through November 1st, featured five days, three of which were split amongst global time zones – Europe, South and North Americas Days, Africa and Europe Day, and Asia and Australasia Day – with the remaining two being EBP Project Days. Sessions ranging from primates to protists kept participants engaged and registrations increasing throughout the week. Most notably, BG24 surpassed 2023’s records with 2,100 registrants and 1,991 unique visitors per day from around the globe. 

“The extraordinary global progress in biodiversity genomics was reflected at the BG24 meeting.  With more than 3000 genomes produced by EBP Affiliated Projects now in the public domain, and rapidly rising, the utility of genomics for conservation, phylogenetics, comparative genomics, and other disciplines has never been clearer or more exciting.  This is just the beginning of a transformative journey to sequence all of life on Earth, and BG24, with more than 2,000 participants this year, has proven itself as the prime vehicle for communicating the important results, social, legal, and ethical considerations, and practical applications of genomic information in addressing issues of organismal resilience to the rapid environmental changes occurring on the planet,” said EBP Executive Council Chair Harris Lewin. 

BGA24, an initiative of the Wellcome Sanger Institute, aims to fill the gap between the education system and the programming, biology, and data comprehension demands of modern-day bioinformatics. BGA24 received 6,600 sign-ups from 60 countries. 

The 57 recorded workshops shown on GitHub throughout the month have been transferred to YouTube for public consumption as the #BG24 Community continues to grow in the years to come.