Peter Daels

Breeding or Assisted Reproduction? Relevance of the Horse Model Applied to the Conservation of Endangered Equids

Many wild equids are at present endangered in the wild. Concurrently, increased mechanization has pushed back the numbers of some old native horse breeds to levels that are no longer compatible with survival of the breed. Strong concerns arose in the last decade to preserve animal biodiversity, including that of rare horse breeds. Genome Resource Banking refers to the cryostorage of genetic material and is an approach for ex situ conservation, which should be applied in combination with in situ conservation programmes. In this review, we propose that, owing to the great reproductive similarity among the different members of the genus Equus, the domestic horse can be used to optimize cryopreservation and embryo production protocols for future application in wild equids. We will give this hypothesis a scientific underpinning by listing successful applications of epididymal sperm freezing, embryo freezing, intracytoplasmic sperm injection, oocyte vitrification and somatic cell nuclear transfer in domestic horses. Some ART fertilization methods may be performed with semen of very low quality or with oocytes obtained after the death of the mare.

Proceedings of the 16th Annual UT-KBRIN Bioinformatics Summit 2016: proceedings

Fig. 1 (abstract P1). RAST server annotations for A. baumanii clinical isolate. Genes associated with virulence are highly represented. P1 Proteogenomic characterization of a clinical isolate of Acinetobacter baumanii from a case of fulminant sepsis: What does the data mean clinically? L Leon Dent, Sammed N Mandape, Siddharth Pratap, Jianan Dong, Jamaine Davis, Jennifer A Gaddy, Kofi Amoah, Steve Damo, Dana R Marshall Department of Surgery, Meharry Medical College, Nashville, TN 37208, USA; Bioinformatics Core, Meharry Medical College, Nashville, TN 37208, USA; Department of Biochemistry and Cancer Biology, Meharry Medical College, Nashville, TN 37208, USA; Department of Medicine, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, TN 37232, USA; Department of Life and Physical Sciences, Fisk University, Nashville, TN 37208, USA; Department of Pathology, Anatomy and Cell Biology, Meharry Medical College, Nashville, TN 37208, USA Correspondence: Dana R Marshall (dmarshall@mmc.edu) BMC Proceedings 2017, 11(Suppl 9):P1