Wednesday Nite at the Lab
press release: WN@TL goes hybrid both with Zoom and with in-person (Room 1111) presentations. The zoom registration link is still go.wisc.edu/240r59. You can also watch a live web stream at on YouTube.
On February 15 Francisco Pelegri, chair of the Laboratory of Genetics, including the Department of Genetics and the Department of Medical Genetics, will speak on “Preserving Biodiversity for the Future.”
Description: Living species are being threatened by multiple environmental stressors, such as habitat deterioration and fragmentation, events caused by climate change, and invasives. Unfortunately, such stressors are predicted to intensify in the future, creating compounding effects that can lead to species extinction.
While environmental protection is paramount, new methods are starting to outline a new set of tools that may help preserve biodiversity, key to population health. These approaches rely on long term preservation of biological samples, which can later be reprogrammed to regenerate cells and individuals to reintroduce the preserved genetic diversity.
We will talk about basic principles of this approach involving proactive, large-scale and non-invasive biosampling and biopreservation, cellular reprogramming, and advanced reproductive technology. We will discuss challenges and some early successes.
Bio: Francisco Pelegri obtained his PhD in cellular and developmental biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after studying genetics as an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship in developmental genetics at the Max Planck Institute in Germany and joined the faculty of the UW–Madison Laboratory of Genetics in 1999.
The Pelegri laboratory uses model organisms such as the zebrafish Danio rerio to study processes in early vertebrate development such as pronuclear fusion, axis induction, cellularization, germ cell formation, and morphogenesis. His research has allowed new insights into vertebrate embryology, reproduction, and disease through techniques such as CRISPR, computational analysis, and biophysical modeling.
Pelegri has earned multiple awards throughout his career, including an NIH Director’s Award, as well as a Romnes Faculty Fellowship and Vilas Research Investigator Award from UW-Madison. In addition, a UW 2020 project on which he is the principal investigator recently received funding. The project, titled “Establishing proof-of-principle models for animal biodiversity biobanking,” has potential applications for both conservation genetics and regenerative medicine.
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