Event

On the 13th July, the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) hosted a live online event on 'Biobanking for conservation: Why cryopreservation is essential for addressing our biodiversity crisis'. Invited speakers included Paul Pearce-Kelly (ZSL), Professor William Holt (University of Sheffield and Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC), Kirsty Lloyd (CryoArks, Natural History Museum), and Dr Mary Hagedorn (Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology).

At this year’s Edinburgh Science Festival, the CryoArks teams based at the National Museums Scotland (NMS) and at the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland (RZSS) participated in a webinar chaired by zoologist, writer and broadcaster, Jules Howard.

Europe Biobank Week (EBW) 2020 will take place between 17-20 November and will fully run digitally! The programme includes a mix of live sessions, e-Poster sessions, industry workshops and on-demand sessions. The ‘Animal Cells and Gametes: Next Generation Biodiversity Resources for Research and Conservation’ on-demand session presents novel and challenging cell cryobiology for non-human species, complementing, learning from and informing equivalent areas in the clinical sectors, and will be of great interest to EBW2020 conference delegates from all areas and biobanking disciplines.

On 23rd June at 14:00, Katie Bird (Senior Enforcement Officer for Access and Benefits Sharing) will host a seminar providing the background to The Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit-Sharing (ABS) supplements the Convention on Biological Diversity’s third objective on the fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from the utilisation (research and development) of genetic resources (plants, animals, microbes and other).

Sílvia Pérez-Espona attended two GenRes Bridge (Genetic resources for a food-secure and forested Europe) workshops as representative of IUCN’s CGSG and the CryoArks project. GenRes Bridge is an EU-funded project with the main objective to develop an integrated strategy and a framework for the crop, forest and animal genetic resources domains. The two back-to-back workshops took place in Tuusala (Finland) between 28th-31st of October 2019 and were organised by project partners from Luke and NIBIO.

Can we bring back extinct species using DNA? Should we? Why else might we archive genetic material? These questions and others were addressed by several members of the CryoArks team at an event at this year’s Edinburgh Science Festival.