Analyzing ASHG abstracts, 2022–2026

This site parses the abstracts published for the American Society of Human Genetics annual meeting (2022–2026: 15,327 abstracts) and asks which topics and wording are rising or fading, who presents, and which phrases, institutions and places are overrepresented among the few hundred abstracts a year chosen for talks; the rest become posters.

Read this first. Only accepted abstracts are published, and authors can request a poster, so “talk rate” is the fraction of accepted abstracts presented as talks, not an acceptance rate or a quality score. Every number is an association, not a recipe for getting a talk. Not every affiliation could be matched: see the match rates.

2What's hot at ASHG 2026

Five shifts in what ASHG abstracts mention, 2022–2026. Scroll through them; the chart shows the share of each year's accepted abstracts that mention a topic.

Long reads and proteomics keep growing

long-read is in 8.7% of 2026 abstracts, up from 4.1% in 2022. proteomics rose from 2.5% to 6.4%, and pangenome from 0.3% to 1.7%.

Genomes keep pulling ahead of exomes

whole-genome sequencing went from 11.2% of abstracts to 13.8%, while exome sequencing fell from 10.6% to 7.8% (WGS and WES count).

All of Us arrived, and cohorts got more diverse

All of Us went from 1.0% of abstracts to 6.0%, and multi-ancestry from 1.8% to 4.0%. UK Biobank held steady, in 12%–14% of abstracts every year.

New tools caught on within a year

AlphaMissense and gnomAD v4, both released in late 2023, were in 40 and 38 abstracts in 2026. Language models went from 2 abstracts in 2022 to 49.

COVID-19 faded

COVID-19 (or SARS-CoV-2) was in 2.7% of 2022 abstracts and 0.8% of 2026's.

All topics as a table
Topic20222022–2026 2026Talks in 2026
long-read4.1% 8.7%35
All of Us1.0% 6.0%23
language model0.1% 1.7%8
proteomics2.5% 6.4%16
multi-ancestry1.8% 4.0%14
pangenome0.3% 1.7%7
whole-genome sequencing11.2% 13.8%32
exome sequencing10.6% 7.8%22
AlphaMissense0.0% 1.3%4
gnomAD v40.0% 1.3%4
COVID-192.7% 0.8%3
UK Biobank12.4% 13.2%40

Share of each year's accepted abstracts mentioning the topic (title or text; spelling variants and abbreviations count). Click a topic to look it up in talks and posters.

3What phrases are overrepresented in talks

For each phrase of one to three words, we compare the odds of a talk (versus a poster) among abstracts that mention it and those that don't. Above 1×, the phrase is overrepresented in talks. A few from 2026:

PhraseTalks vs posters mentioning itOdds of a talk · 95% CI
neanderthal 2.0% vs 0.1% 13.4×
rare damaging 2.0% vs 0.2% 10.9×
autoimmune diseases 3.2% vs 0.5% 7.0×
qtls 4.0% vs 0.8% 5.2×

Four 2026 phrases that lean toward talks, sorted by odds of a talk with versus without the phrase; log scale, dashed line = 1× (as common in talks as in posters). Few abstracts make for wide intervals. Click a phrase to look it up.

Clinical work stopped leaning toward posters. Through 2025, “patients”, “likely pathogenic” and “diagnosis” came up more often in posters than in talks; in 2026 they were at least as common in talks.

share of talksshare of posters
Phrase2022–2026 Odds of a talk 2022–252026p (change)
patients 0.69×1.10× 0.007
likely pathogenic 0.63×1.34× 0.010
diagnosis 0.76×1.15× 0.034

Each row on its own scale. These phrases were picked before looking at 2026, but across every phrase tested no single shift survives a false-discovery-rate correction: suggestive, not established.

42026 abstracts are worded differently

“framework” is in 27% of 2026 abstracts, up from 10% in 2022–2025. It is one of 288 words significantly more common in 2026, and most of them are general wording rather than new topics.

How this differs from the sections above. Those look at hand-picked or talk-leaning phrases. This one tests every single word, comparing 2026 with 2022–2025, whatever the topic and whether it was a talk or a poster.

Manhattan-style plot of every word, alphabetically, by minus log10 p for being more common in 2026 abstracts than in earlier years, with a Bonferroni line; framework stands far above the rest.

Every word, alphabetically, by how strongly it is overrepresented in 2026 (p from a one-sided Fisher's exact test per word); dashed line: Bonferroni correction. Hover a point for its word, click it to look it up.

Word2026 abstracts 2022–2025 abstractsOdds ratio p

Every word in the figure, the most overrepresented first; scroll the table for more, click a heading to sort. Bold p: significant after Bonferroni correction. A word less common in 2026 has an odds ratio below 1 and p near 1.

5Institutions with the highest talk rate

Among the 50 institutions with the most first-author abstracts (2022–2026), Regeneron, MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital lead, at 23%–25% of abstracts given a talk, against 10.1% overall.

InstitutionTalks / abstractsTalk rate · 95% CI
Regeneron 17 / 68 25.0%
MIT 13 / 53 24.5%
Massachusetts General Hospital 56 / 243 23.1%
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai 42 / 212 19.8%
UCLA 35 / 187 18.7%
Broad Institute 82 / 447 18.3%

First author's institutions; dashed line = all abstracts (10.1%). Smaller institutions have wide intervals. In 2026 alone, Johns Hopkins University, University of Chicago, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai had the highest rates.