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And to close, the one who made it all possible. 🌅 Closing keynote: Prof. Ana Conesa on SQANTIverse, a unifying framework for long-read transcriptomics. LongTREC coordinator, VALT organiser, and a field-shaper for years. No one better to end on. Thank you, Ana. 💙 #VALT2026 #LongReads #SQANTI

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VALT 2026 Round Table, in a few lines that stuck: 🔹 Move from the gene to the transcript as the unit of biology 🔹 Technical ground truth ≠ biology 🔹 A zoo of RNA modifications now waiting for AI to learn And of course: there'll be a next VALT. 🌅 #VALT2026 #LongReads

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Where next? 🔮 Before the close, the Scientific Committee take on the VALT 2026 Round Table: The Future of Long-Read Transcriptomics. Three days of chromatin, benchmarking, proteoforms and RNA mods behind us, now the conversation turns to what comes next. #VALT2026 #LongReads

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Roll up your sleeves: from long reads to proteins, hands-on. 🧬💻 This afternoon's workshop is Long-Read Proteogenomics with LRP2, led by Gloria Sheynkman, Megan Schertzer and Julia Lewandowski. #VALT2026 #LongReads #Proteogenomics

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Aggressive cancers hide their complexity in the transcriptome. 🧬 Camilla Ugolini closes the session with BRIGHT, a long-read resource built to resolve transcript and epitranscriptomic complexity in aggressive breast cancer. #VALT2026 #LongReads #BreastCancer #Epitranscriptomics

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RNA modifications that shift in real time. ⏱️ Logan Mulroney takes the stage to present direct RNA nanopore sequencing of human pancreatic beta cells, revealing how modifications change rapidly after glucose stimulation. #VALT2026 #LongReads #DirectRNA #Epitranscriptomics

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Better quantification, not just more reads. 📊 Keynote: Prof. Kin Fai Au (Univ. of Michigan) on how long reads improve quantitative transcriptome analysis. Co-lead of the LRGASP benchmark and author of miniQuant, showing exactly where long reads earn their place. #VALT2026 #LongReads #Quantification

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Thank you for a brilliant talk! Looking forward to what the @goekelab.bsky.social brings to the field of long read transcriptomics next!

Day 3 opens with modifications. 🧬 First keynote: Dr Jana Jeschke (Institut Jules Bordet, ULB) on nanopore-resolved epitranscriptomic landscapes in human breast cancer. Reading RNA modifications directly in native molecules, mapped across real tumours. #VALT2026 #LongReads #Epitranscriptomics

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Closing day 2. 🧬 Final keynote: Prof. Gloria Sheynkman (Univ. of Virginia) on going from long reads to proteoforms, linking transcript isoforms to the proteins they actually make. The perfect bookend to a day spent deep in isoforms. #VALT2026 #LongReads #Proteoforms

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The genome is hiding more proteins than we've annotated. 🔬 Next: Nuo Xu on pairing long-read transcriptomics with Ribo-seq to expand the noncanonical proteome. Translation is happening well beyond the ORFs we already know about. #VALT2026 #LongReads #RiboSeq #Proteome

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Long reads, full throttle. 🧬 This afternoon's workshop belongs to Pacific Biosciences, with Kinnex front and centre: large-scale automatable RNA-seq, full-length isoform workflows, and SQANTI tooling stretching from bulk to single-cell and single-nuclei. #VALT2026 #LongReads #Kinnex #IsoSeq

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Flash Talks incoming. ⚡ 🫁 Colette Felton on novel driver alterations in lung cancer 🦎 Brian O'Toole on annotation across vertebrate orders 🧫 Mariana Ribeiro on FLIGHT-seq full-length isoform sequencing 🧠 Rosemary Bamford on isoform diversity in the human cortex

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The ocean is full of genomes we've barely read. 🌊 Up next: LongTREC's Carmen Lafuente (Genoscope, CEA) revealing the hidden genetic diversity of marine plankton. Long reads opening up a corner of life that's been hard to see. #VALT2026 #LongReads #MarinePlankton #NonCannonicalSplicing

Heat, stress, and a genome with four copies of everything. 🥔 Next: our own Nadja Nolte (National Institute of Biology) on using long-read RNA-seq to study the heat stress response in polyploid potato. Long reads earning their keep in a properly tricky genome. #VALT2026 #LongReads #Polyploidy

Splicing patterns you can actually trust. 🔬 Next: Prof. Lauren McIntyre (Univ. of Florida) showing that variation in splice junctions is reproducible across technologies and conserved across species. Signal over noise- exactly what the field needs. #VALT2026 #LongReads #Splicing #Drosophila

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Prof. Mark D. Robinson (Univ. of Zurich) on systematic benchmarking of long-read RNA-seq platforms and doing it properly with Omnibenchmark. Fair, reproducible comparisons from someone who's long pushed for them. #VALT2026 #LongReads

How do you annotate a lncRNA locus when the annotation simply isn't there yet? 🧬 Fabio Zanarello (CRG, Guigó lab) takes the stage next with his answer: transferring gene models across species to map lncRNA loci.

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To join, or not to join? 🎭 That's the question Fabian Jetzinger is putting to us next, on handling biological replicates in lrRNA-seq data. #VALT2026 #LongReads #lrRNAseq #CallOrJoin

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Up next! 🧬 We're delighted to hand over to LONGTREC's very own Yalan Bi (Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics): "Interactome predictions from long-read transcriptome sequencing (LRTS) data."

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Day 2 is underway! ☀️ We're opening this morning with a keynote from Prof. Matthew Ritchie (WEHI): "Benchmarking and analysing long-read RNA-sequencing data with LongBench and FLAMES." Rigorous benchmarking and the tools to act on it. #VALT2026 #LongReads #Transcriptomics #LongTREC

Now at #VALT2026: the Oxford Nanopore workshop. Aino Järvelin kicks off, then Jonathan Göke on the cDNA beta test and library prep for long-read RNA-seq, and Christoph Dieterich on RNA modification co-occurrence from direct RNA-seq. #LongTReC #lrRNAseq

⚡ Flash talks at #VALT2026 ⚡: four quickfire takes on building and annotating transcriptomes with long reads: transcript-end detection in FLAIR4, the non-coding transcriptome, structural gene prediction, and tissue-specific isoform atlases. #LongTREC #lrRNAseq

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Next at #VALT2026: Anastasiya Grinko on expanding the known transcriptome at the single-cell level, using long reads to surface novel isoforms in macrophages and monocytes from diseased tissues. #LongTREC #lrRNAseq #SingleCellLongRead

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Next at #VALT2026: Juan Francisco Cervilla on evaluating gene fusion expression in B-ALL at single-cell resolution, using long reads to resolve fusion transcripts cell by cell. #LongTREC #lrRNAseq #FusionGenes

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Next at #VALT2026: Maximillian Gabriel Marin on personalized transcriptome annotation, exposing reference-biased isoforms and how structural variation shapes human transcript diversity. #LongTREC #lrRNAseq

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ext at #VALT2026: Fairlie Reese on long-read transcriptomics across a genetically diverse human cohort, revealing ancestry bias in gene annotation. Non-European transcripts are underrepresented in current references. #LongTREC #lrRNAseq

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Next at #VALT2026: Mahmud Sami Aydin on de novo transcript construction and isoform clustering from gene clusters. Reference-free assembly of paralogous regions, where reference-guided methods tend to struggle. #LongTREC #lrRNAseq #DeNovoTranscriptReconstruction

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Next at #VALT2026: Pablo Angulo on long-read sequencing, uncovering transcriptional allele-specific dosage compensation in aneuploidy. Phasing expression to its allele of origin to see how cells buffer altered chromosome dosage. #LongTREC #lrRNAseq #Aneuploidy #AlleleSpecificExspression

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Continuing the epigenome theme at #VALT2026: Tianyuan Liu on SQANTI-Epi, integrating Fiber-seq with long-read RNA-seq to link chromatin state to isoform regulation. #LongTREC #VALT2026 #lrRNAseq #transcriptomics

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