prof.dr. MAM (Martien) Groenen

Prof Groenen’s research focuses on how an animal’s phenotype is shaped by the joint interplay between genes, genome and environment and in particular how selection affects the genomes of livestock species. He has been involved in mapping the genomes of various farm animals since the beginning of the 1990s. He played a prominent role in the international chicken and swine genome sequencing projects whose genomes were published in Nature in 2004 and 2012 respectively. He was also involved in international projects that sequenced the genomes of turkey and duck and recently his group assembled the genomes of the great tit and the yellow tail king fish. In 2009 he was awarded an advanced ERC research grant for his research project 'Molecular characterization of genetic factors in the pig under selection during speciation, domestication and breeding'. Many of the identified signatures of selection are located within non-coding regions of the genome. Current research activities are focused on the further characterization of these regions to provide deeper insight in the interplay of the selected variants within gene networks and the genomic context, by using a range of Next Generation Sequencing (NGS)-based studies (whole genome methylation, histone modification using ChIP-seq). He is one of the initiators and member of the steering committee of the recently established FAANG consortium (Functional Annotation of Animal genomes). Professor Groenen has published over 290 peer reviewed articles and is a regular invited speaker at international conferences and workshops.