Genetics research thrives north of the Arctic Circle 2023-08-14
The Svanhovd Research Station of the Norwegian Institute of Bioeconomy Research (NIBIO) was setup for research in the Barents region (north of the Arctic circle 66.5°N). Thanks to a serendipitous meeting at the SAGS Conference in 2022, Prof. Dave Berger set up a collaboration with Dr Simo Maduna, a researcher at Svanhovd with South African roots. Dr Maduna is a geneticist who has ongoing projects on sharks, salmon, lumpfish and polar bears. He is a specialist in a genotyping by sequencing method called RADseq. Simo was interested to apply it to a plant system so this was a good match for the non-model Greyia tree project in the MPPI lab. Almost no DNA information was available for Greyia. Together with Masters student Ine Botha, the 3RADseq method has proven to be a good platform for SNP discovery in Greyia. Dave made a brief but highly productive visit to the NIBIO research institute at Svanhovd, where the final SNP panel and genotyping platform were selected to wrap up this phase of the project. The trip ended with a hike with Canadian journalists to Treriksrøysa (three-country cairn) where the Norwegian, Finnish and Russian borders meet. Dave flew back via Copenhagen so visited Stevns Klint where the thin extra-terrestrial iridium-rich layer at the K-Pg boundary is visible (from the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago). This is fascinating to those interested in plant genome evolution as the Angiosperms radiated after this event with whole genome duplications evident.