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Government

The 2019 global pandemic has made pathogen genomics a new area of priority for the Genomics Institute. We are proud that our UShER tool was used to help identify Covid-19 variants and is currently the default lineage tool used by the CDC. We are currently engaged in contracts with the state of California to make our community safer.

The UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute supports a number of collaborations with National Parks to allow them to use environmental DNA (eDNA) to make land management and conservation decisions. Rachel Meyer’s lab works with national parks to collect soil and water samples that they use to determine what species are and are not present in a particular area, and how this changes over time. Projects have included tracing harmful algae blooms in Alaska, monitoring watersheds in Hawaii, and determining what factors were leading sea otters to populate certain inlets and not others in California.

UCSC group in collaboration with the National Parks
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California Conservation Genomics Project

The UCSC Genomics Institute is proud to be participating in the CCGP, which aims to sequence the genomes of 230 species in California in order to create a comprehensive genomic dataset for managing regional biodiversity. Russ Corbett-Detig’s lab is the bioinformatics team for the project, and Beth Shapiro is on the scientific executive committee and technical committee.

NASA BioSCape

UC Santa Cruz scientists are collaborating with NASA on their new BioSCape project, “the first Biodiversity field program incorporating airborne imaging spectroscopy, lidar, and field observations across South Africa’s Greater Cape Floristic Region (GCFR).” UC Santa Cruz’s role will be to collect eDNA samples that NASA can then compare to the data it is able to collect from the air. We completed our first round of data collection in 2022 and will be returning again in 2023.

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Last modified: Jul 02, 2024