Dr. David Duffy was recently invited to speak at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona, Spain. The CRG is an international biomedical research institute of excellence with over 450 scientists from 55 countries, whose mission is to discover and advance knowledge for the benefit of society, public health and economic prosperity.
The invited talk discussed how human cancer genomics approaches can be used to understand the causes of sea turtle tumors and to develop novel eDNA technologies to monitor sea turtles and their pathogens in the wild. It also covered recent advances in airborne DNA biodiversity genomics, their implications and potential, and explored their promise for diverse fields.
While in Barcelona, Dr. Duffy and his collaborator at the CRG, Dr. Maximilian Stammnitz, were interviewed by El Periódico, a major daily Spanish newspaper. The article discusses the work by the team to understand the potential benefits and ethical dilemmas raised by their discovery that human DNA can be recovered from the environment, including outdoor air.