The 2018 SMRTLeiden Meeting includes two back-to-back events: SMRT Scientific Symposium and the third European SMRT Informatics Developers Meeting. The SMRT Scientific Symposium is a two-day event on June 12 and 13 that features presentations from key experts and opinion leaders sharing their scientific discoveries and novel analytical achievements using PacBio sequencing platforms. This event is packed with inspirational lectures that highlight the latest achievements in various fields: from microbes to human health. The SMRT Informatics Developers Conference is a one-day collaborative event on June 14 that focuses on developing and improving analysis tools for PacBio SMRT Sequencing data. This event is packed with several short presentations, in-person brainstorming and idea exchange among software developers and the bioinformatics community concentrate on advancement of new and existing open-source tools for de novo assembly, genome phasing, structural variations, base modification and Iso-Seq analysis.

It gives me great pleasure to invite you on behalf of Human Genetics department of Leiden University Medical Center to Leiden for the third edition of the SMRTLeiden Meeting from June 12 - 14, 2018. We are looking forward to welcoming you to the beautiful city of Leiden and we are very excited to be a host to such an outstanding lineup of speakers highlighting their inspirational and breakthrough achievements enabled by SMRT Sequencing technology. This forum is for all scientists active in fields such as genetics, transcriptomics and epigenetics to review the latest developments and explore potential collaborations. I, for one, am certainly looking forward to various opportunities to meet, brainstorm, and exchange ideas and I hope you are too. Join your colleagues for a great meeting in Leiden in June, 2018.

Yahya Anvar, Ph.D.

Leiden University Medical Center