Genome assembly. chromosomal organization and comparative genomics of multiple bird species: beyond "catalogues of genes"
Lead Research Organisation:
Royal Veterinary College
Department Name: Comparative Biomedical Sciences CBS
Abstract
Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.
Planned Impact
Exploitation and Application.
Technology Transfer activity at both Universities is administered by Enterprise offices. Collaborative agreement already exist with Digital Scientific and CytoCell. These separately capture exploitation and collaborative output issues going forward. Cytocell, Aviagen and Digital Scientific UK see benefit to this project either through the identification of commercially important traits or through the sales of products and have thus offered generous in kind support. A specific strategic advisory board has been established to identify potential impact issues from this and other projects.
Communications and engagement with the identified beneficiaries.
The main beneficiaries of this grant will be the avian genomics community in industry, third sector and academia. In 2002 the Kent lab was set up as a resource centre for avian molecular cytogenetics (FARMACRHOM). Through these activities we developed a mature and functioning collaborative network with most of the major players in avian genomics and biology many of whom have attached letters of support. Evolution Highway the "industry standard" for browser comparative genomics in the mammalian chromosome world with over ~50 regular users 16,000 hits from academia, industry and third sector in the last year. Inherently used for collaborative research it is, in itself, a tool to facilitate communication and engagement. Another beneficiary is the poultry breeding industry through which the Kent lab is, and has been, supported and funded through BBSRC grants and PhD CASE studentships. In the past we have provided genome maps for the species of interest (turkey and duck). A local zoo (Wingham Wildlife Park) was engaged as another and benefitted by subsequent broadcast media coverage and by provision of a display on the collaborative work performed (this is currently on display to the general public). We will participate in company-managed events and community activities with specialist audiences and the general public to disseminate findings and will develop as a CPD module for delivery to outside engagers. We will contribute to the Bioscience KTN newsletter, to "BBSRC business," newsletters published by individual companies and by the Departments/Universities and to media coverage as well as online activities. Bioscience KTN provide further help and advice on collaboration and their website has >3,000 registered members working in industry and academia The PI's have a healthy relationship with the University press offices and are regular contributor to public engagement activities including "Café Scientifique," Science Fairs and public lectures. Thus far, this work has led to several press releases in addition to appearances in the national and local broadcast media (BBC's "Big Questions," "The World Tonight", Radio 2 Simon Mayo show" BBC radio Kent etc.). Both Universities have active outreach programmes to which the PIs will contribute.
Capacity and Involvement
The two PIs will be the primary participants in impact activities aided by by PhD students and post-doctoral researchers. Professor Griffin has extensive training and experience in communication activities and commercial exploitation of research. The communications and development office in both Universities provide technical expertise and help in writing publications, web pages and user-friendly interfaces and it is expected that post-docs and PhD students will be provided with significant training in both dissemination and exploitation activities through Departmental, University and Bioscience KTN related activities. In conclusion therefore, this project has a range of expertise and ambitious, but achievable plans for impact at local, regional national and international levels.
See complete impact plan (attached) for further details
Technology Transfer activity at both Universities is administered by Enterprise offices. Collaborative agreement already exist with Digital Scientific and CytoCell. These separately capture exploitation and collaborative output issues going forward. Cytocell, Aviagen and Digital Scientific UK see benefit to this project either through the identification of commercially important traits or through the sales of products and have thus offered generous in kind support. A specific strategic advisory board has been established to identify potential impact issues from this and other projects.
Communications and engagement with the identified beneficiaries.
The main beneficiaries of this grant will be the avian genomics community in industry, third sector and academia. In 2002 the Kent lab was set up as a resource centre for avian molecular cytogenetics (FARMACRHOM). Through these activities we developed a mature and functioning collaborative network with most of the major players in avian genomics and biology many of whom have attached letters of support. Evolution Highway the "industry standard" for browser comparative genomics in the mammalian chromosome world with over ~50 regular users 16,000 hits from academia, industry and third sector in the last year. Inherently used for collaborative research it is, in itself, a tool to facilitate communication and engagement. Another beneficiary is the poultry breeding industry through which the Kent lab is, and has been, supported and funded through BBSRC grants and PhD CASE studentships. In the past we have provided genome maps for the species of interest (turkey and duck). A local zoo (Wingham Wildlife Park) was engaged as another and benefitted by subsequent broadcast media coverage and by provision of a display on the collaborative work performed (this is currently on display to the general public). We will participate in company-managed events and community activities with specialist audiences and the general public to disseminate findings and will develop as a CPD module for delivery to outside engagers. We will contribute to the Bioscience KTN newsletter, to "BBSRC business," newsletters published by individual companies and by the Departments/Universities and to media coverage as well as online activities. Bioscience KTN provide further help and advice on collaboration and their website has >3,000 registered members working in industry and academia The PI's have a healthy relationship with the University press offices and are regular contributor to public engagement activities including "Café Scientifique," Science Fairs and public lectures. Thus far, this work has led to several press releases in addition to appearances in the national and local broadcast media (BBC's "Big Questions," "The World Tonight", Radio 2 Simon Mayo show" BBC radio Kent etc.). Both Universities have active outreach programmes to which the PIs will contribute.
Capacity and Involvement
The two PIs will be the primary participants in impact activities aided by by PhD students and post-doctoral researchers. Professor Griffin has extensive training and experience in communication activities and commercial exploitation of research. The communications and development office in both Universities provide technical expertise and help in writing publications, web pages and user-friendly interfaces and it is expected that post-docs and PhD students will be provided with significant training in both dissemination and exploitation activities through Departmental, University and Bioscience KTN related activities. In conclusion therefore, this project has a range of expertise and ambitious, but achievable plans for impact at local, regional national and international levels.
See complete impact plan (attached) for further details
People |
ORCID iD |
| Denis Larkin (Principal Investigator) |
Publications
Damas J
(2017)
Upgrading short-read animal genome assemblies to chromosome level using comparative genomics and a universal probe set.
in Genome research
Damas J
(2018)
Reconstruction of avian ancestral karyotypes reveals differences in the evolutionary history of macro- and microchromosomes.
in Genome biology
Farré M
(2016)
Novel Insights into Chromosome Evolution in Birds, Archosaurs, and Reptiles.
in Genome biology and evolution
Griffin DK
(2020)
Time lapse: A glimpse into prehistoric genomics.
in European journal of medical genetics
Griffin DK
(2022)
Dinosaurs: Comparative Cytogenomics of Their Reptile Cousins and Avian Descendants.
in Animals : an open access journal from MDPI
Kim J
(2017)
Reconstruction and evolutionary history of eutherian chromosomes.
in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Kretschmer R
(2020)
A Comprehensive Cytogenetic Analysis of Several Members of the Family Columbidae (Aves, Columbiformes).
in Genes
O'Connor RE
(2019)
Patterns of microchromosome organization remain highly conserved throughout avian evolution.
in Chromosoma
O'Connor RE
(2018)
Reconstruction of the diapsid ancestral genome permits chromosome evolution tracing in avian and non-avian dinosaurs.
in Nature communications
O'Connor RE
(2018)
Chromosome-level assembly reveals extensive rearrangement in saker falcon and budgerigar, but not ostrich, genomes.
in Genome biology
Proskuryakova AA
(2017)
X Chromosome Evolution in Cetartiodactyla.
in Genes
Rando HM
(2018)
Construction of Red Fox Chromosomal Fragments from the Short-Read Genome Assembly.
in Genes
Zhang G
(2014)
Comparative genomics reveals insights into avian genome evolution and adaptation.
in Science (New York, N.Y.)
| Title | mapping avian genomes |
| Description | The artistic work was designed that demonstrates our approach to assemble avian genomes combining RACA and universal FISH probes. The work has been used on multiple websites together with our press release. |
| Type Of Art | Artwork |
| Year Produced | 2016 |
| Impact | Our press releases have been given a higher attention because of this artwork piece. |
| URL | http://www.rvc.ac.uk/Media/Default/Press%20Release/genomics-article-illo.jpg |
| Description | During the 4 years of this project we focused on producing a comprehensive resource and tools for chromosome mapping and comparative analysis in birds and other reptiles and on questions related to patterns of chromosome evolution in birds. We aligned 21 avian genomes that were made available to us through the international avian genome project to chicken chromosomes and made results of these alignments available to our collaborators through the Avian Evolution Highway chromosome browser: http://eh-demo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/birds/. We further used this resource to contribute and lead the chromosome evolution section of the avian genomes comparative paper (Zhang et al. Science, 2014), perform sequence-based comparison of chromosome evolution in birds (Farre et al., GBE, 2016), and to reconstruct the ancestral avian chromosome structure (Romanov et al., BMC Genomics, 2014). Together these papers formed a significant contribution to knowledge of avian chromosome evolution: (i) showing that the rates of chromosomal rearrangements in birds are differing in evolutionary time, (ii) stability of avian karyotypes could be explained by a low fraction and distribution of transposable elements and conserved non-coding elements in avian genomes, (iii) evolutionary stable regions of avian chromosomes are enriched for genes responsible for ancestral phenotypes, (iv) genes found in lineage-specific rearrangements of avian chromosomes are often connected to lineage-specific characteristics, such as forebrain development in parrots. From a technical perspective, we were able to establish a new computational resource: a six node computer cluster at the RVC that was used by our group to achieve these and other deliverables of the grant. We attracted a talented Ph.D. student who built RACA assemblies for 18 avian genomes (RACA of avian genomes was performed as part of the grant BB/J0101170) and published them on Evolution Highway (http://eh-demo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/birds/). In year 3 our efforts were dedicated to building a tool that would allow us to use RACA avian assemblies to produce complete and verified chromosome-level genome assemblies for birds. We have used our multiple species alignments of 21 avian genomes to select bacterial artificial chromosomes (BACs) from chicken and zebra finch genomes that have a high probability to hybridise specifically to metaphase chromosomes in majority of bird species. A set of 250 such clones have been selected and used to map RACA assemblies of pigeon and peregrine falcon to chromosomes. We estimated that more than 90% of pigeon and falcon genomes were mapped to chromosomes using this new hybrid assembly approach. The chromosome-level assembly of peregrine falcon (first assembled to chromosomes highly rearranged avian genome) allowed us to find a new possible cause for evolutionary stability of avian genomes - interchromosomal rearrangements in birds are strictly limited to the genome intervals containing long "deserts" of highly conserved elements and this might be related to a unique regulatory landscape of avian genomes. We published a paper in Genome Research describing our new mapping approach and this discovery (Damas et al., Genome Research 2016). During the year 4 we focused on comparing genome assemblies of avian genomes and applying our novel assembly approach to new species. We assembled 3 additional avian genomes to complete chromosomes: Ostrich, Saker falcon and Budgie. Comparing these genomes with genomes of other birds we confirmed our previous discovery that interchromosomal changes in avian genomes are limited to a small number of sites with low density of conserved elements (O'Connor et al., Genome Biology, 2018). We utilised our and other avian genome assemblies together with conserved BAC clones to answer the question about the probable karyotype structure of the ancestral dinosaur genome (O'Connor et al., Nature Communication, 2018) and finally we reconstructed chromosome structures of 14 avian ancestors in the lineage leading to zebra finch. A striking difference in the rates of rearrangements was detected for macro- and micro-chromosomes between the older and newer ancestors with micro-chromosomes being very stable in avian evolution until the appearance of the Passeri lineage. We also identified several micro-chromosomes that were maintained intact in the avian evolution since the Avian ancestor and linked evolutionary stability of avian chromosomes with density and distribution of evolutionary conserved non-coding elements (Damas et al., Genome Biology, 2018). In appreciation of our work we were invited to contribute a chapter on avian chromosome evolution to a book about avian genomics (Damas et al. 2019). As it follows from the text above we had very successful 4 years of the project: (i) we developed the largest publicly available resource of chromosome structures in birds, (ii) have contributed to a major comparative paper on avian genome evolution published in Science, had another one in BMC Genomics; (iii) Designed and applied a method to foster chromosome mapping and assembling genomes to chromosome level in birds, (iv) published four important papers on patterns of avian genome evolution (Farre et al., 2016; Damas et al., 2016, O'Connor et al., 2018; Damas et al., 2018), (v) secured further funding from BBSRC to apply our assembly approach to 25 mammalian genomes in order to study chromosome evolution in mammals. All members of our lab had a chance to present the results of this project at multiple international conferences. |
| Exploitation Route | Our Avian Evolution Highway chromosome browser became a widely-used database to look for structures of chromosomes and synteny in different birds and reptiles. This database, together with the NCBI and our UCSC Genome Browser hub is the place where we place the new chromosome-level and RACA assemblies we produce for avian genomes. This information facilitates search of chromosome intervals and scaffolds that contain orthologous genes in different species and therefore could be used to find signatures of selection in different avian lineages as well as to transfer the genome annotation from the well-annotated avian genomes like chicken and zebra finch to other, "poorly" annotated genomes (17-18 genomes). By increasing the number of species and improving quality of assemblies we expect to increase the impact of this resource. A new method to assemble avian genomes to chromosomes is critically important nowadays when sequencing and scaffolding of genomes can be done easily but an error-free chromosome level assembly is very expensive to produce. Our method already caused a lot of interest and will be utilized by the Genome10K consortium. We built contacts with Dovetail Genomics to develop this approach further to make their HiC based chromosome assemblies more accurate. Also, Avian Evolution Highway is an excellent educational resource that could be used to teach students about the patterns and principles of chromosome evolution in birds and other reptiles in a visually appealing interactive way. |
| Sectors | Agriculture, Food and Drink,Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software),Education |
| URL | http://eh-demo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/birds/ |
| Description | Evolution Highway freely available from http://evolutionhighway.nsca.uiuc.edu/birds is used as an educational aid by Dr. Larkin and other groups to introduce students to ideas of comparative genomics during lectures and practicals, as well as to develop tutorial student projects related to comparative and "informatics-paleogenomics". The database build during the four years of this project provides a new excellent educational material for students and the general public to study bird and mammalian genomes and ancestral amniote chromosomes. We expect that the special issue of Science dedicated to bird genomics (and associated media coverage of the issue) will have large societal impact making the general public aware of the variety and unique biology of birds. The new assembly method we designed for making better avian genomes resulted in five avian genomes being assembled (5 published). The list includes the Ostrich and Pigeon genomes that are from economically important species. Their genome assemblies could be used by breeding companies to design new or improve old breeds. Our new assembly method allowed us to build connections to apply this approach to additional genomes including the Bustard genome together with the UAE University. We developed contacts with the Dovetail Genomics company to use our approach as part of their HiC genome assembly pipeline to end up with better assembly results from their pipeline. |
| First Year Of Impact | 2016 |
| Sector | Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software),Education |
| Impact Types | Societal |
| Description | Responsive mode |
| Amount | £387,536 (GBP) |
| Funding ID | BB/P020062/1 |
| Organisation | Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) |
| Sector | Public |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Start | 10/2017 |
| End | 09/2020 |
| Description | Responsive mode |
| Amount | 6,000,000 ₽ (RUB) |
| Organisation | Russian Foundation for Basic Research |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| Country | Russian Federation |
| Start | 10/2017 |
| End | 09/2020 |
| Description | Royal Veterinary College Ph.D. studentship award |
| Amount | £50,000 (GBP) |
| Organisation | Royal Veterinary College (RVC) |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Start | 04/2013 |
| End | 04/2016 |
| Title | Avian ancestors |
| Description | Reconstruction of 14 avian ancestor chromosome structures were obtained. |
| Type Of Material | Biological samples |
| Year Produced | 2017 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | The paper describing this resource in under review in Genome Biology |
| URL | http://eh-demo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/birds/#/SynBlocks |
| Title | Chromosome-level assemblies of the saker falcon, budgie, and ostrich |
| Description | Chromosome-level assemblies were generated for the saker falcon, budgie, and ostrich genomes using a combination of Reference-Assisted Chromosome Assembly and the conserved avian BAC clones |
| Type Of Material | Biological samples |
| Year Produced | 2018 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | A paper was published in Genome Biology describing patterns of chromosome evolution in saker falcon, budgie, and ostrich genomes. |
| URL | https://datadryad.org/resource/doi:10.5061/dryad.q70q40m |
| Title | Peregrine and pigeon chromosome level assemblies |
| Description | Chromosomal level genome assemblies of peregrine falcon and rock pigeon have been generated combining our RACA method with the universal FISH probes designed by our group. These assemblies have been submitted to NCBI under accession numbers MLQY00000000 and MLQZ00000000, our avian chromosome level-assembly UCSC Genome Browser hub: http://sftp.rvc.ac.uk/rvcpaper/birdsHUB/hub.txt and our Evolution Highway comparative chromosome browser: http://eh-demo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/birds/ |
| Type Of Material | Biological samples |
| Year Produced | 2016 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | Our new method of assembling genomes to chromosome levels has a potential to change the way how genome assemblies are done (reducing the cost drastically). We are making additional assemblies using this method and expect these to have a large impact of the genetic studies of the species we assemble to chromosome levels. |
| URL | http://eh-demo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/birds/ |
| Title | Universal set of 250 BAC clones to map avian genomes |
| Description | A set of >200 chicken and zebra finch bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) clones equally spaced across the avian genomes were chosen to produce specific high quality hybridization signal across diverse avian genomes. The set was built based on multiple-sequence alignments of multiple (21) avian genomes and considering the level of inter-species sequence conservation within the BAC clones. The resulting set of clones works with >90% success rate on any avian species chromosomes. |
| Type Of Material | Biological samples |
| Year Produced | 2015 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | Five avian genomes (pigeon, peregrine falcon, chicken, zebra finch and turkey) were already mapped with this set of clones. For two genomes (pigeon and peregrine falcon) chromosome-level genome maps and assemblies were built. A paper describing the tool and genome assemblies was published in Genome Research (Damas et al., 2016). Three more avian assemblies are currently being generated (saker falcon, budgerigar, ostrich). These clones have been used to map a total of 25+ avian and other reptile genomes. |
| URL | http://sftp.rvc.ac.uk/rvcpaper/birdsHUB/hub.txt |
| Title | Avian Genomes Interactive Evolution Highway Chromosome Browser |
| Description | We built an interactive Evolution Highway website that contains results of alignments of chromosome structure of 21 avian and 5 non-avian species. This site provides user is easy means for visualising and comparing chromosome structures of different bird species, detections of the regions of conserved synteny, and evolutionary breakpoint regions. The browser was upgraded to contain reconstructed chromosomes of 14 avian ancestors. |
| Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
| Year Produced | 2013 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | This database was used to produce data and visualise the results of chromosome analysis for 4 papers: Zhang et al. (Science, 2014); Romanov et al (BMC Genomics, 2014); Farré et al. (GBE, 2016); Damas et al. (Genome Research 2017); Damas et al. (Genome Biology 2018); O'Connor et al. (Genome Biology 2018). |
| URL | http://eh-demo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/birds/ |
| Description | Camel chromosome level genome assemblies |
| Organisation | University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna |
| Department | Department of Pathobiology |
| Country | Austria |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | Dr. Larkin served as a consultant at a IAEA meeting in Vienna dedicated to construction of radiation hybrid chromosomal maps for camel species. As the result of this meeting it was decided that Dr. Larkin's group will be responsible for constructing reference-assisted assemblies of the dromedary and Bactrian camels. Dr. Larkin has appointed an RVC master student to perform this work who is doing this project now. In addition Dr. Larkin is now a partner on the ongoing FWF-RSF application to study chromosome evolution and selection in camel breeds in Central Asia. In 2018 the reference assisted assembly of the Dromedary camel has been finished and published. |
| Collaborator Contribution | Dr. Pamela Burger from the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna has provided us with the genome assemblies and raw read data to perform reference assisted chromosome assemblies of dromedary camel. She also provided with the DNA samples required to perform verification of RACA camel assemblies. Dr. Polina Perelman from the Institute of Molecular Biology, Novosibirsk, Russia has provided us with BAC maps of alpaca genome to facilitate RACA chromosome-level assemblies of camel genomes. |
| Impact | Denis Larkin's group performed initial reference assisted chromosome assembly using RACA for the dromedary camel genome (Fitak et al. 2016). The tool assembled 1,797 scaffolds (10 Kb minimum size) into 154 predicted chromosome fragments (PCFs) of which one was homologous to a complete cattle chromosome (chromosome 25). The longest PCF was 112 Mb long containing 97 scaffolds and the shortest PCF was 117 Kb long containing two scaffolds. The N50 of the RACA initial assembly was 31,2 Mb which is 21 times higher than the N50 = 1,48 Mb of the original assembly. The total length of the assembled PCFs was 1,886 Mb or 94% of the original dromedary scaffold-based assembly. RACA splits 44 (2%) scaffolds as potentially"chimeric". All split scaffolds are currently being verified by PCR prior to running the second (final) round of RACA were all scaffolds with confirmed structure will be kept intact. The paper describing this with our master student as a first author has been published in Frontiers in Genetics in a special collection dedicated to camel genomics (PMID: 30804979) |
| Start Year | 2016 |
| Description | Houbara genome assembly |
| Organisation | United Arab Emirates University |
| Country | United Arab Emirates |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | We started a collaboration with the UAEU on assembling the houbara genome in order to help conservation and restore population of this bird species So far my research team instructed the group in the United Arab Emirates to perform HiC assembly of the genome in addition to the Ion Nanapore assembly they already had. After the assembly was constructed we preformed comparison of HiC scaffolds to zebra finch and chicken chromosomes in order find miss-asemblies and structural differences between genomes. |
| Collaborator Contribution | They performed initial sequencing of the houbara genome as well as prayed for the HiC assembly. |
| Impact | Comparative map of the houbara genome has been delivered to the UAEU group. |
| Start Year | 2018 |
| Description | Russian ruff chromosome evolution |
| Organisation | Uppsala University |
| Country | Sweden |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | I organised a collaboration to collect samples of ruff birds from Chukotka (Russia) to study evolution of their sex chromosomes. I analysed 17 samples obtained in 2020 including genotyping of the sex chromosome inversion found in satellite males. |
| Collaborator Contribution | Leif Andersson (University of Uppsala) initiated the project. Diana Sokolova (Russian Far East University of Ornithology) was catching birds and collected blood. |
| Impact | So far one satellite animal was identified. More will be collected in 2021. |
| Start Year | 2020 |
| Title | Chromosome level assembly method for ainmal genomes |
| Description | A novel technique has been developed and published allowing to assemble fragmented animal genomes to chromosome level using a combination of RACA and universal FISH probes. |
| Type Of Technology | New/Improved Technique/Technology |
| Year Produced | 2016 |
| Impact | Several avian genomes have been upgraded to chromosome level using this approach and a larger number of genomes is currently in our pipeline to be upgraded. |
| URL | http://genome.cshlp.org/content/early/2016/11/30/gr.213660.116.abstract |
| Description | Night at the RVC |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an open day or visit at my research institution |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | About 300 people have attended our boost at the Night at the RVC event. We presented our software tool that teaches the general public the principles of the chromosome evolution. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| Description | School for young scientists 2016 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | More than 100 participants from the former soviet union counties have attended the School for young scientists held in Zvenigorod, Russia in 2016. Dr Larkin gave an invited lecture on the current status of animal genome studies resulting in a lot of questions from the audience and the follow up discussions. The organising committee has requested a review paper to be written and published based on the lecture given. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| Description | School of young scientists |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | More than 100 participants from the former soviet union counties have attended the School for young scientists held in Zvenigorod, Russia in 2018. Dr Larkin gave an invited lecture on the current status of animal genome studies resulting in a lot of questions from the audience and the follow up discussions. The organising committee has requested a review paper to be written and published based on the lecture given. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| Description | School visit (Stevenage) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Schools |
| Results and Impact | about 150 pupils from regional schools attended the RVC event at which we presented our software tool aiming at teaching kids the principles of chromosome evolution |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |