Tonight I watched the Question & Answer session of the Conservation Showcase from London Calling 2023. The moderator noted how each of the three panelists had very projects. Phoebe Oldach from Basecamp Research in the UK spoke about bioprospecting and not reinventing the wheel… improving discovery. Matthew Miller from Reneco International Wildlife Consultants in the United Arab Emirates noted that The Red Sea Fish program is motivated by the search for aquaculture solutions in a hot and saline environment. They want to use native fishes to feed a growing regional population. The third speaker, Luca Pandolfini from the Italian Institute of Technology in Italy, explained how their work is now blurring the lines between the lab and field work. Now the epigenome of a species can be readily obtained with Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT) sequencing. I was intrigued by a question asked to Miller about what to do with DNA from fish and birds blocking pores. They explained that the team is using heating steps to reduce structure of DNA. They can assemble a bird genome with 20X coverage. Miller is excited about low-pass imputation to do shallow sequencing and variant calling without Illumina reads. Oldach described how transcriptomic data will help infer more about novel enzyme function for use in new hosts. I appreciate how all three panelists centered access and engaging with communities.
