Elaine Guevera is a graduate student at George Washington University and was able to spend a lot of time with our study abroad group while we were here in Madagascar. Elaine decided to give us a thought provoking lecture on conservation genetics. The main reasons she studies genetics is to help with species recognition of animals and to measure diversity within species and populations. The technology in the field of genetics is advancing extremely fast. One innovative, but not necessarily new, technology is the miniPCR machine. This machine enables researchers to run pcr while in the field. While this may not seem like a huge deal, it saves a great deal of time and energy, while also making the process much more efficient.
Another amazing piece of technology is CRISPR CAS 9-gene drive. This technology has two huge purposes. One of the main purposes is to introduce potentially adaptive genetic variation into endangered species. This could potentially lead to resurrecting extinct species, permitting that they have relatively close living species. Another huge impact that this technology could have is the eradication of evasive species by introducing detrimental genes into a lab population and then releasing said lab population into the wild. The lab population would then mate with the wild population and lead to the decline of the species. In mosquitos this was done by releasing sterile mosquitos to the wild, thus reducing the population of mosquitos.
By Nick Kane
