As summer has finally arrived, things in the ConesaLab have taken a more relaxed tone. To begin the month, Roc Martin came to visit us to learn about long-read transcriptomics. Roc was a participant in the Spanish Biology Olympics, and both of our LongTreckers tried to blow his mind with our research! However, Roc was super interested in everything we do in the lab (as you also are, for sure), and we couldn’t fry his brain with the complex and funny-sounding words we used (because who doesn’t love a good old unique-splice junction?). As reward for his amazingness, Roc got his own SQANTIcard, with the promise to cite us in the future, to complete his collection. (BTW, check out Parasidney, the amazing band created by Angeles, one of the former SQANTI3 developers!)
To fight against the Mediterranean heat, the whole lab had a day out where we went to a swimming pool in Valencia! It was such a great day of connecting among ourselves in a different environment than we usually do. At some point, we even began talking about ways to improve our beloved SQANTI3, but it has a different approach when done while sunbathing in the water 😉
After getting the energy back in our bodies, we went on a full work month, finishing the final preparations for both the LongTREC Summer School in Norwich and the ISMB/ECCB 2025 in Liverpool. All of us had either a presentation, a poster, or some social media to finish off before the kickstart of the events! And the best way we could do them was by organizing Ana’s sustainable trip. What an adventure it was. If you want to learn more about it, check out the blog post on it:
The Summer School was a blast and a complete success. A total of 27 students spent a week at Norwich’s Earlham Institute, where they were guided by our amazing LongTREC team into the world of long-reads. From transcriptomics to genomics, going over tRNAs, everybody left the room every day mind-blown one way or another. The dedication shown when preparing the event was rewarded 100% for the team.
Carol, Tian and Fabian were lecturers during the course. Carol gave the first class on sequencing technologies and experimental design (attaching picture of me teaching), and also Tian participated by giving a lecture on SQANTI-reads. Fabian worked a lot and gave lectures on two days about SQANTI, IsoAnnotLite, and the concepts of differential expression and differential isoform usage. Ana taught about TappAS. The Summer School was a very fun experience where the members of the LongTREC consortium shared their expertise on different topics, including single-cell long reads, epitranscriptomics, and metatranscriptomics, with a group of researchers with different backgrounds (master’s students, doctoral candidates, postdocs, and platform technicians, working on all sorts of model organisms and aiming to use long-read transcriptomics in their work). To finish up the Summer School, we had a tour of the Earlham Institute and visited their multiple sequencing platforms from Illumina, PacBio, and ONT. It was sequencing paradise for us!
Thanks to the LRB Summer School course, I’ve had the chance to meet amazing people who speak the same language as I do. I also learned about the latest advances in long-read sequencing technology. It’s been an intense but very productive week.
I’m taking new friends and knowledge back with me to A Coruña! 🙂
Elsa Martin
PhD Student
Having worked mainly with short reads, it was really interesting to learn more about long-read technologies and to see their impressive potential. It was great to gain a deeper understanding of the SQANTI-verse and other amazing tools like TappAS
Alessandro Giordano
PhD Student
In July 2025, I had the incredible opportunity to attend the Long TREC Summer School on long-read transcriptomics. It was a great chance to dive deeper into this exciting and rapidly evolving field, guided by knowledgeable and supportive PhD student from the consortium. The program was well-organized, and I learned a lot throughout the experience.
I’m looking forward to staying connected with the all the members of the Long TREC consortium!
Francesco Pelizari
PhD Student
The ISMB/ECCB conference in Liverpool, which was right after the Summer School, gave Ana, Carol, Fabian and Tian new energies. They were joined by Carlos, Quique, Julen, Fabian, and Pablo (such a big and great team). The first day, all of them were overwhelmed by the size of the event. More than 2,000 participants and many fascinating talks going on at the same time. Well, almost all of them were overwhelmed, Ana was exhilarated, like a little kid on her first day of school. She attended many talks and met old friends at the event. With every AI talk she attended, we shuddered, for we knew that it meant more fun work for us in September.
The week flew by, and many things went on. Carlos (who was sponsored by the Conexion BCB of CSIC ❤️), Quique, Fabian, Julen, Pablo and Carol presented posters in the second session (you could see Carol running between her two posters, talking here and there, and in her own words: “I had fun running around hehe :)”). Pablo became a card machine, giving out SQANTI-cards to everyone that showed interest or had posters on the topic, spreading the SQANTI-verse to new horizons. Tian helped immensely with his talk on SQANTI-Tusco. In this case, the best was saved for the end. It was great to see the reward of all his effort in such a great presentation! Ana was also busy, chairing the HitSeq track and being part of the iRNA round table! In HitSeq, many cool talks happened, like the one from Liz Tseng and Carol’s favourite: Jonathan Göke on long-read transcriptomics quantification and RNA modifications.
Tavelled for science in October
Overall, July was a month where we could connect with our peers, within and outside of the lab, in many different environments. Even though it was great altogether, all of us are looking forward to the summer holidays, to enjoy a well-earned rest and get our batteries fully charged for a new course in September full of AI wonders and new frontiers to break!