Floris and Yi-An attended the EMBO Workshop on Telomere function and maintenance in health and disease (May 25–30, 2026) in Lazise, Italy. Floris’s abstract was selected for an oral presentation, and Yi-An gave a lightning talk.

Rhyker and Simon Puglisi presented at RECOMB-Seq 2026 (May 24–25, 2026) in Thessaloniki, Greece.

Four new manuscripts from the lab have been posted online:

• Chromosome-arm-specific telomere length governs dual modes of structural genome instability
• A complete human pancreatic cancer genome
• Telomere dysfunction in human astrocytes drives acrocentric chromosome instability
• KaryoScope: rapid, alignment-free sequence annotation for the pangenome era

Floris presented at the CSHL Biology of Genomes meeting (May 5–9, 2026) at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, New York.

Floris gave an invited seminar at Yale University in New Haven, CT, hosted by Roel Verhaak.

Floris gave an invited talk at the National Cancer Institute’s Cancer Data Science Laboratory Seminar in Bethesda, MD, hosted by Mikhail Kolmogorov.

The lab traveled to Boston, MA for the American Society of Human Genetics Annual Meeting (October 14–18, 2025), with a platform talk and four posters:

• Platform talk (Floris): Telomere dysfunction promotes remote recombination events between telomeres, centromeres and ribosomal DNA that are catalyzed by long-range chromatin interactions
• Poster (Yi-An): Ultra-long-range telomeric chromatin interactions are enriched in cancer cells and involve repetitive elements
• Poster (Yue & Mimi): Telomere dysfunction and spatial proximity cooperate to shape the genomic evolution of pre-cancerous astrocytes
• Poster (Rhyker): Sequence annotation using KaryoScope facilitates the rapid and accurate classification and quantification of repeats, genes, and other genomic elements
• Poster (Sharvari): Utilizing alignment-free classification of cell-free DNA sequencing reads to monitor tumor burden in primary brain tumors

The team took a break at the Diamondbacks game. Although unfortunately we did not score a win, we still had a great time!