Dr. David Duffy was recently invited to give a prestigious Merck Innovation Seminar. Merck is an international Pharmaceutical and Life Sciences company which employs over 65,000 people across 63 countries.
The seminar was titled, “Innovation in the air: Airborne DNA genomics for rapid assessment of whole biomes, genetic diversity, pathogen surveillance & drug discovery”, and covered the capture and analysis of animal, plant, fungal, bacterial and viral DNA from environmental substrates such as air, sediment, or sea water. It focused on the latest advances in eDNA genomics, including their potential for the surveillance of wildlife and pathogens such as the sea turtle tumor-associated virus, ChHV5, and for habitat-scale drug discovery.
These eDNA approaches have been pioneered here at the UF Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience and Sea Turtle Hospital, by Dr. Duffy’s lab, together with their local partners and international collaborators. These approaches have now been applied to terrestrial and marine environments around the globe, opening up exciting new avenues for genomics research.