News
ABG at the WIAS annual conference 2025
On Tuesday 4 March the WIAS (Wageningen Institute of Animal Sciences) annual conference 2025 took place in Reehorst, Ede. Several ABG colleagues attended the conference and gave a pitch or poster presentation.
Each year WIAS organizes the WIAS annual conference. This meeting welcomes PhD candidates, postdocs, staff and support staff of WIAS affiliated chair groups and offers an excellent opportunity to network and hear the latest scientific developments.
Contributions of ABG at the parallel sessions
Several ABG colleagues gave a presentation at one of the parallel sessions. Eugénie Guennoc gave a presentation on assessing genotype by environment (GxE) interactions in Dutch dairy farms, between organic and conventional systems and across dietary concentrate levels. Tzayhri Osorio Gallardo gave a presentation on the genetic analysis of laying hen movement based on computer vision data.
Three ABG colleagues gave a presentation that focused on animal reproduction. Marije Steensma gave a talk on the identification of candidate lethal mutations affecting fertility in Friesian horses, Huifang Kang talked about the role of CD52 gene in the male mice reproductive tract and Pedro Sá gave a presentation on genes influencing semen quality traits.
Prizes for Job van Schipstal and Sophie Valk
The candidates from ABG to present a poster at the poster session were Anne Boshove, Liyan Deng, Job van Schipstal and Linseng Zeng. Job van Schipstal’s poster about ‘Balanced breeding for Dutch warmblood horses’ received a prize. His poster provided an overview of his research to create a balanced genetic management plan for Dutch Warmblood horses, combining selection for performance, health and conformation, maintaining genetic diversity and reducing frequency of heritable defects. The insights gained in the project will be integrated into a strategy for balanced breeding. Martijn Derks, Harmen Doekes, Martien Groenen, Marije Steensma and Bart Ducro from ABG are also involved in the project.
Sophie Valk (ABG/MAE) received a prize for her presentation 'Oysters in transition: Hermaprhodite oysters display unique DNA methylation patterns in their gills'. Sophie and her colleagues characterized sex-specific DNA methylation by comparing whole-genome gill methylomes between 35 flat oysters of different sex phenotypes, using nanopore sequencing, to get more insight into the epigenetics
underlying sex reversal in a sequential hermaphrodite invertebrate.
You can download an overview of all the contributions by ABG colleagues here.