 So, good evening, everyone, wherever you are. And it's a great pleasure to have you today, connecting with us. And I thank each of you and everyone for taking time to be here with us today to exchange on animal genetic resources of Southern Africa and their biobanking using stem cells technologies. So I'm Christian Tiambu-Tiambo from the Center for Tropical Astrogenetic and Health at Illyri in Nairobi. And I'll be co-convening this webinar with Dr. Juan Mene, Esatu, from the Tropical Portrigenetic Solution from the Illyri Addis Ababa and Dr. Musa Assan from the Rosling Institute, University of Edinburgh at the UK. So today we have a wonderful lineup of panelists and experts. We first will have Dr. Polobotcher from FAO. We have Mary Borre-Kariuki from AUI Ababa who should be joining us. We have Prof. Arai Mushadei from the Agriculture Research Council of Johannesburg in Southern Africa. And we have also Dr. Moriri from the Ministry of Agriculture, Department of Agriculture Research in the Gaboron in Botswana. We are also expecting to have Dr. Tniko Edward from the University of Zibabwe. And I will be replacing substituting Dr. Jun Ho from the Rosling Institute, who is currently involved in another training on bio-banking in China. Then we'll have Prof. Tom Boden from the Rosling Institute and Dr. Hamot Meya from the GIZ ABS Capacity Development Initiative, who should be assisted also by Mrs. Efi Kayemba from the Environmental and Occupational Health Safety at the International Life Doctorate Institute. So this webinar should be structured as follows. We have first two presentations from our Mutilateral and Regional collaborators. This is FAO and AUI Ababa. And this will be followed by Q&A session. Then the second Q&A session will come after the presentation from our national partners from South Africa, Botswana, and Zibabwe. Then the third one should be after the presentation from the livestock technology expert. This is Prof. Tom Boden and Jun Ho that I represent. And will be also the compliance expert led by Dr. Hamot Meya from GIZ and Efi Kayemba from Illuri. So you are most welcome. Please feel free to use the chat box to introduce your question, to introduce yourself using the Q&A question also and your institution as well. And for the presenter, please, you are free to use your camera when you are talking. And of course, the webinar will be recorded. And the recording will be shared later to all the participants. And also it will be available on our platform, communication platform at Illuri and partners institutions. OK. And before we continue, I will allow Dr. Musa to introduce the context of this webinar. Musa, please. Thank you, Christian. And welcome everybody to this webinar and wherever you are, depending on the time, good morning, good afternoon. Now, one of the greatest resources in Africa is its rich diversity of indigenous animal genetic resources. And most of these are essential for food security and poverty alleviations to millions that live within the continent. But besides food security and poverty alleviation, some of these indigenous animals also possess unique adaptive traits, which include tolerance to disease and pests, tolerance to heat, feed, and water shortages, and the ability to cover long distances in such a personal resources. So the indigenous breeds, in essence, serve as distinct uses in economic, social, and cultural aspects in the African context. However, due to a variety of reasons, these indigenous resources are now threatened by extinction. And one of the ways to avoid this is to avoid or to mitigate this threat is through conservation of these resources. And especially in the face of climate change, this becomes more imperative. And we argue that this can be achieved through integrated approaches, which include both in situ and exceed to conservation strategies, as well as a package of services supporting farming practices. As a result, in recent years, through the support of Bill and Belinda Gates Foundation and the UK Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office, CTLGH, which is a creation between the Hilary SRUC, which is a Scottish Rural University College and the University of Edinburgh through the Roslyn Institute, have established and piloted several innovative protocols for conservation of animal genetic resources using the stem cell approach. Deployment of some of these protocols have started in collaboration with AU IBA, and is being extended with ill-risk farmer-facing programs like TPGS, which is a tropical poultry game services, and ABBG, and African National Partners, or the CGIR Supplement Initiatives. Now, this webinar is a preparatory through regional web lab by Banking Training, South Africa, and the CTLGH too. So this is the second funding phase of CTLGH, aiming to present and familiarize participants with the gene bank operations, conservation, and restoration of local animal genetic resources using stem cell technologies, and to contribute to the strengthening capacities for conservation practices and sustainable use of local and locally adapted animal genetic resources, and CTLGH, and its partner institutions, which, as I said, include Roslyn, SRUC, and Library. So I believe that by participating in this webinar, we're in the right place and the right time, and together we can all accelerate the extent of ideas and methods to scale up our good practices in conservation of animal genetic resources. So I will give it back to Christian, who is going to introduce our first presenter, and then we can get on with the webinar. Christian. Thank you very much, Musa. And today, our first presenter is Paul, Paul Butcher, from FAO. Paul is already online, and while he's loading his presentation, allow me to introduce you to the participant. So Paul is an animal production officer and has been working for more than 14 years as the food and agriculture organizations at the United Nations FAO in Rome, Italy, within the animal production and health division. He has worked as an outposted officer of the FAO IA Division of Nuclear Technique in Food and Agriculture at the headquarter of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, Austria. And the primary activities of his work is to support countries to implement the global action plan for animal genetic resources with a particular emphasis on conservation and on applications of biotechnologies. And this is also one of the main reason why Thomas has been one of our main key players throughout this journey on capacitating the NAS, capacitating the regional and international institutions in making sure that conservation is properly done and the resources are used, the technologies are used to feed the purpose and meet the demand from the ground. So Paul has previously worked as a research scientist in Canada and Italy, and of course, in the International Atomic Energy Agency, as I mentioned. And he has authored and co-taught more than 200 scientific publications on these issues of genetic resources. And he also currently serves as the secretary of the Intergovernmental Technical Working Group for Animal Genetic Resources within the Commission of Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. And today, Paul will be introducing to us the new FAO guidelines on conservation and genomic characterizations and the domestic animal diversity information system that is which is supporting conservation and sustainable civilizations of animal genetic resources across the world. Please, Paul, you have the floor. I'd like to start off by just thanking Christian for the invitation for me to speak on our new FAO guidelines for the management of animal genetic resources. In addition, I'd like to acknowledge the contributions of my colleagues, Rosvita Baobung and Greg Wah in the preparation of this presentation. So I think all of you probably know this, but why are animal genetic resources important? Well, they form an essential part of the biological basis for world food security. This is because more than 1 billion people rely directly on livestock for a major proportion of their livelihoods, and several other beings are involved in livestock value chains. Therefore, a diverse resource base is critical to eradicate world hunger. Genetic diversity of livestock breeds allows the species to adapt to current and future environmental constraints. And it also serves as the raw material for breeders to make genetic improvement. Although breeds are considered club goods, individual or sovereign to countries, this genetic diversity is essentially considered international public good. Given that a lot of the genes, genetic information is shared by breeds across borders. And therefore, there's a logical role in the UN in the form of the Funera Culture Organization of the UN and Global Coordination in the management of this genetic diversity. So what are the roles and responsibilities of FAO? That was mentioned by Christian. We collaborate with member countries to support country-driven efforts to implement the Global Plan of Action for Animal Genetic Resources. The Global Plan of Action is the only internationally developed and adopted plan to improve the management of the world's animal genetic resources. It was developed through a multi-country process and then endorsed by FAO Conference. You have the meaning of file member countries in 2007. And then we affirmed also in the FAO Conference in 2017. The Global Plan of Action contains 23 different strategic priorities for action, which aim to address current and future challenges to the livestock sector. These 23 different strategic priorities are assigned to one of four different priority areas, the first of which is characterization inventory and monitoring, the second sustainable use and development, the third conservation, and the fourth policies, institutions, and capacity building, which really underlies the application of the first three strategic priority areas. Additional roles and responsibilities are that FAO monitors the status of implementation of this Global Plan of Action. FAO also monitors the state of the global animal genetic resources based on inputs from countries. And therefore, this is in some ways to look at the indirect impact of implementation of the Global Plan of Action. We also try to raise awareness and promote animal genetic resources issues internationally. Another responsibility is to establish or strengthen international information sharing, research, and education. One example in how we do that is the data is the domestic animal diversity information system. Just to give you a bit more information on that, data serves as a web interface for the global database of livestock breeds. It currently has information for nearly 9,000 different breeds from 37 different species and managed bees was recently added to that. This database allows countries to document the presence of livestock breeds and species, as well as their valid relatives in their country and then describe their characteristics. It serves as a convention of biological diversity, clearinghouse mechanism for the diversity of animal genetic resources. And it is also the source of data for sustainable development goal indicators 2.5.1 and 2.5.2, which deal with XC2 and NC2 conservation, respectively. So this slide shows some screenshots of data. The first in the upper left hand is the home page of data. The one in the upper right shows an example from here in the southern Africa of information for a breed. And the final in the bottom shows an example of how data can be used to prepare and present different graphs and other sorts of figures. Among the other roles and responsibilities are to promote international cooperation and develop partnerships among countries and then to participate, like I'm doing today, in events that partners arrange. We build capacity through training workshops, which includes not only those from far, but also those by our partners. And then we provide technical support to countries in a variety of different ways. For example, implementing and backstopping projects, developing international technical standards and protocols, and then producing technical guidance. And this final method of support is what I'm going to talk about for the rest of my presentation. Among the strategic priorities for the Global Plan of Action is to develop international technical standards and protocols. This is important because some countries may lack knowledge or the familiarity with the most effective and up-to-date methods and protocols for the management of animal genetic resources. So guidelines can help build capacity. And also application of standardized approaches facilitates information sharing and cooperation and evaluation of implementation across countries. FAO has collaborated with experts from around the world to develop a collection of technical guidelines. This slide shows an example of the ones that have been developed in the past. We have there are eight or nine different guidelines that are assigned to various strategic priority areas and then one overarching guidelines on preparing national strategies and action plans. Most of these guidelines were developed soon after the adoption of the Global Plan of Action in 2007. They do, however, remain fully applicable in most cases. However, in other instances, technology had advanced rapidly so that updating the guidelines has become warranted. For example, in the cryoconservation or XC2 in vitro conservation, genomics, reproductive physiology, and cryobiology, those technologies have advanced. As well as there's been more effort in utilizing material in gene banks rather than just supporting as a way to save breeds or prevent breeds from extinction. With molecular genetic characterization, of course, genomics has advanced greatly in the last 10 years as well as analytical methods for the associated data. And therefore, FAO over the last couple of years has developed new guidelines on these two topics. So this slide just shows the cover pages of the two different guidelines. Regarding innovations in cryoconservation, from 2016 to 2020, FAO was a partner in the European Union Horizon 2020 Research Project entitled IMAGE, where IMAGE stands for Innovative Management of Animal Genetic Resources. IMAGE, as you can imagine, generated numerous research results for improving cryoconservation programs. One of the deliverables of IMAGE was an assessment of the previous FAO guidelines on cryoconservations and proposal of contents for an updated version. Scientists from IMAGE partner, therefore, served as co-authors of each chapter of these guidelines, although we matched them with non-IMAGE scientists to ensure a global perspective, not just European focus. And then scientists from the Nordic Genetic Resources Center also noticed Nordgen. We're also partners of IMAGE and they served as co-editors of the guidelines. As far as the contents, I'm not going to give a lot of detail on the authors, but at least explain the contents. First, we start out with building a gene-backing strategy, which of course should be the basis for all subsequent actions. Chapter two deals with implementation and organization and looks into quality management of gene banks. Section three regards the choice of biological material, such as femen, embryos, stem cells, and so forth. Chapter four looks at the economics of gene-banking, concerning not only the cost, but also the returns on investments. Section five looks at developing and using collections and comparing to the previous guideline, looks more into using genomics in management of collections. Section six updates new methods for collection in cryopreservation of germ-plasmid tissue. Section seven looks at sanitary issues because these are important, not to cryopreserve pathogens along with your genetic material. Section eight is on databases and documentation, given that the information associated with samples is more and more becoming just as important as the samples themselves. Nine is on legal issues, such as the Goyen protocol, and 10 is on capacity building and training. Moving on to genomic characterization, FAO has had a long history of cooperation with International Society of Animal Genetics, better known as ISAC. And in fact, ISAC is a standing committee called the ISAC FAO Advisory Group on Animal Genetic Resources. Members of this advisory group have led development of previous FAO guidelines, leading back as far as 30 years ago. This started with secondary guidelines on the management of domestic animal diversity, looking when the first application of molecular genetics in characterization. Then there's a decision to develop recommended microsatellite markers to standardized procedures, which was released in 2004. And then we also work with FAO or with ISAC members in developing guidelines in molecular characterization in 2011. Therefore, it is natural to have current and past members of this advisory group to service editors for the new guidelines. And these editors also chose authors for specific topics, many of who were also ISAC members. So just give an overview of the content that starts out with an introduction, which backs up the rationale of characterization of livestock populations and looks at future prospects. It then goes into the basics of upstream planning for molecular genetic characterization studies. Section three is on genomic tools and methods, which gives it overviews of the approaches such as genome sequencing, use of SNP chips, genotyping by sequencing, and then imputation from a lower level of information to a greater level of information. Section four is applying the new genomic methods for evaluating genetic diversity and looks at approaches for both within breed and across breed studies. And there are also several different appendices which give more details on topics in these four chapters. So in conclusion, animal genetic resources are important public good for food security. FAO members have an intergovernmental process for assessing the management of global animal genetic resources, which is guided by the global plan of action for animal genetic resources. Individual countries bear the main responsibility for implementation of a global plan of action, but FAO provides technical assistance to countries and then monitors the status of animal genetic resources and the status of implementation of a global plan of action. New guidelines on trial conservation and genome characterization have been prepared by international experts and were made available online in January of this year. This shows the two different, the URL for these guidelines, they're only available online although we're developing now ebook formats and because these slides will be shared you can just use these links at later time. So with that, I'd like to thank you for your attention and I will stop sharing and pass the floor back to Christian, thank you. Thank you, thank you very much Paul for this wonderful presentation and for this tool that you are voting to us and to the end users, to the managers of the original gene banks to ensure the sustainability and efficient use of genetic resources we have in the region. And as Musa mentioned at the beginning, this webinar is to really prepare the regions to the upcoming wet lab training on bio banking using the stem cells technologies. And we're supposed to have Mary Bolekaruki from AUIBA. I'm told from their office that she's still involved in another meeting and she's not yet free. But while waiting for her to join us, I will request Dr. Farah to step in and make her presentation. If that is okay for you, Prof. Farah, are you okay? Yeah, that is okay, I'll share my presentation shortly. Thank you. Okay, thank you very much. Thank you. So why Dr. Farah is sharing representation allow me to introduce her. So she's senior manager for research and biotechnology platform at the agricultural research console in South Africa. And she also leads the animal genetics and genomic research group at the biotechnology platform, managing various projects on livestock and wildlife genomics. And her research interests are on the in characterization, sustainable utilization and conservations of livestock genetic resources. And currently she's also involved, she also involved the applications of genomics and the population genetic tools in unraveling the genetic diversity and identifying adaptive feature associated with livestock species from marginalized farming environment. And she is passionate about investigating how the genetic adaptations can be harnessed into mainstream agriculture. So this is one of the key persons we have in the Southern African regions to support us in conservation and sustainable use of genetic resources. She has a very vast experience in characterization of genetic resources. And today she will be talking to us about local genetic resources in Southern Africa and their conservation status. Please, Farah, you have the floor. Okay. Thank you, Christian, and good day everybody. So as indicated, I'll talk about the local poetry genetic resources in Southern Africa and their conservation status, particularly as we build towards this initiative of cryopreservation and more targeted conservation strategies. So I think for us, if we look at poetry genetic resources there are quite a number of effects on the table that really needs to be considered when we look at their conservation. One is if we look at what's happening in Africa, in most countries, poetry is actually considered or taken synonymous with chicken. A lot of information that we find categorized under poetry is chicken genetic resources, putting aside other poetry species like the guinea fowl, the pigeons, ducks, techies, geese, quails, and there is quite a list of species that are out there, that are not characterized, that are not talked about, and that are not really known. Then when we look at the local chicken ecotypes, we also find that the major limitation is there are no defined breeds. What we talk about is really ecotypes. For example, we talk about the land in Mozambique, Squanna chickens, Botswana, of Ambo, South Africa. Some countries just talk of their chicken populations as village chickens, local chickens, or ecotypes. In some countries where they've made efforts to define them, they are really defined around major genes or major morphological traits, like we know about the naked neck, which we know that it's a major gene, but it is being taken synonymous as a breed as well. Guafizim in many other morphological traits that are associated with these chickens. What this really says is we have a problem. We have so many unknowns in terms of these portrait genetic resources and is emphasized by the FAO unknown species or breeds are as good as extinct because you can't even monitor them properly and you can't follow through whether they are managed properly and their existence is also safeguarded. When we look at the ecotypes in the chicken populations within the chicken family, we also find that the information is really scant. If we look at the poise, just talked about the FAO, that is database, which really takes a lot of this information from the different countries and puts it in one platform for everyone to know what's out there. That information is scant for chickens. Actually chickens in portrait species are one of the species with close to zero information on country statistics. And again, lack of information is a major risk to the existence of any species. However, if we look at literature, we find that lots of work has been reported on local chicken genetic resources at a country level across countries in Africa and also outside Africa. Information on flock sizes, socioeconomic importance at household levels, phenotypic characterization of these populations, what traits the farmers prefer and select for. There's been an increasing work on genetic characterization with the advent of genomic probe tools. We also see a lot of genomic profiles, sequences, genomic data on these populations. And this is actually good news. Although that information is still fragmented, it is the entities increasing in quantity. So actually this information needs to be consolidated and see how the countries can further input into the FAO that is, but also that it would really feed into any future initiatives around their conservation and proper utilization. What ecosystems are we really talking about? I think one common feature is you move on from one country to the other country is the high phenotypic diversity that you really observe in these chicken populations. There are called ecotypes, but you observe so many phenotypic variation that you even get to believe that you are dealing with so many genetic populations. So there is also hypothetically many genotypes that we are talking about. However, one characteristic of them is that there's breeds of populations who are lead described. So people really don't know, we really don't know what the boundaries are. We didn't really don't know which ones really constitute a breed or a population. And then that leaves us with the two major questions. What is it that we need to conserve and should we really need to conserve them? What we know now, I think there has been a lot of work that has been done. And like I said, with the advent of genomics, we are seeing a lot of work going into the characterization in the study of these populations. And one thing that I think we now know now is almost close to effect is genetic diversity within and between these populations is very high. I think the picture that I'm showing there is typical of most village chicken populations where you see them differing so much from the Braila populations, the exotic established Braila populations and layer populations, which is contrary to the myth that these populations had been mixed up with the established exotic breeds. And such biodiversity really needs to be tapped into and it needs to be conserved. We now know that they are carriers of different and unique diversity from the exotic Braila's and layer breeds. So they don't not only carry so much diversity, they are different from the established Braila populations. And what this also tells us that is each population or each ecotype carries unique diversity. And in terms of conserving the total biodiversity, it means that we should prioritize them and we should be able to preserve them as they add into the total biodiversity. This is really important, particularly when you talk about resources, allocation, and making available the infrastructure and prioritizing populations, you need to make sure that there is a representation of these ecotypes and these village populations in the concept engineering pool. What we also know now about these populations is that they are adapted to local conditions. So the figures out there are studies that have been done in local chicken populations, one demonstrating that their diversity is geographically distributed and that their diversity is associated with genes that are adapted or that confer resistance and adaptation to local conditions. And so by conserving these populations, you are really preserving genes with local adaptation and in the advent of climate change that is threatening us, we really need to make sure that we know where these adapted genotypes are and pick them up and conserve them. In terms of the place to their biodiversity, I think one of the most pronounced one across populations is the extreme environmental conditions and compromise production systems. And we know that poultry species are very sensitive to environmental conditions, whether it's temperature, rainfall patterns, they are also very sensitive to nutrition. So they demand high quality feeds. So this is a major threat to their survival. Diseases are also a major threat to their survival. The map below really shows the distribution of new castle disease. And we see that Africa is really challenged by new castle disease in South Africa so much. So we could be in 34 senses. No, I never, I never... The next map shows the distribution of avian influenza, which is also affecting, you know, South Africa, South Africa and Patsole, Zimbabwe and just north of South Africa, they are also highly affected by avian influenza. And when these two diseases affect populations, they really wipe populations, causing bottlenecks and reducing the diversity. So that's something that's also need to be managed in terms of conservation. The other threat to their biodiversity is the risk due to adoption of non-local breeds, especially in intensive chicken production system. And we see a growth in the adoption of intensive chicken production systems across Africa as households try to use chickens as a major source of income. Then they go and sell exotic breeds as they are yielding. And that really puts a threat on local breeds. The conservation status of portraits, I think, again, if we go to the FAO that is, we see that predominantly it's nonexistent in African countries. Country after country, you don't get really what's happening at that level. However, we know from a lot of literature, which also needs to be pulled into that, that there are some in situ conservation practices happening at country levels. This is conservation through utilization with the local farmers, smallholder farmers acting as custodians and conserving these local genetic resources. But we've also seen the incoming of certain initiatives. If you look at the native chicken project of Mozambique and Uganda, if you look at the African Chicken Genetic Gains Project by EOE, the CTLGH, we find that these are initiatives that are really promoting in situ conservation of these poultry species by basically matching the different genotypes to the appropriate environment and promoting the farmers to use them in making sure that they are able to produce optimally and to provide that the goals that the farmers are looking for. However, these challenges that we are still faced with is the inadequate characterization of the local chickens in most Southern African and African countries. So it is really difficult to fully understand the present diversity that could be used to formulate and implement a lot of these conservation as strategies through utilization. So efforts needs to be increased. There have been some efforts. Some countries are really advanced in creating an inventory of the local chickens. That's really been a fundamental step towards mid-conservation and breeding. Our exit to conservation outside their natural habitats and we are looking at conservation in zoos, in conservation flocks or herds, in biobanks, and also I think the main topic of today through cryo-preservation. This is one way that can actually ensure or it needs to ensure that the diversity is conserved. However, we have major limitations, particularly with poultry, but with also other species, that now you'll be maintaining these organisms in the artificial habitats. There is usually a deterioration of genetic diversity, mainly because you can't capture everything. It's expensive to set up the structures to conserve these and to maintain them over time. So what usually you find is people assembling partially into a very small extent of the genetic diversity that's in that population, thereby leading to depression. Because the populations are kept outside their natural habitats, there is the adaptation to these captive or artificial environments and therefore loss of survival skills for the natural habitats. One good example that I have is one that has been set up a long time ago by the South African Agricultural Research Council, which was called the Falspo Africa Program. So what that program actually did was to sample from the major phenotypes that we find in the village populations. And we had the vendor, the naked neck, the ovumbo and the other genotypes. However, that program was really challenged like I indicated with poor sampling. So you assume what went in and sampled really major genotypes or interesting phenotypes. What we have seen over time is the divergence of the conserved populations from found in field populations. The program itself is very expensive to run and it is exposed to the same risk and threats as natural populations. So some of these conserved populations have actually been lost whether it's because they couldn't be maintained anymore or they were threatened by natural diseases. We also observed reduced population sizes in these populations. And that's typical of conservation flux because it's also very challenging and expensive to keep on adding the diversity into these conservation paths. This is just an illustration of what I'm talking about where we went in a couple of years down the line and we sampled the village populations and we sampled the conservation flux. And what you observe is a clear divergence of the two populations. The village ecotypes are now sitting on their own separate from the conservation. That's not what you want. When you are conserving, you need to ensure that you maintain that diversity and you'll be able to retrieve that diversity when you need it. There are other methods and initiatives around XC2 and I didn't go into detail as I thought that's the discussion in the next session of cryopreservation technologies, which if you look at poetry, it was not talked about in early years because the technologies were really challenging. It was difficult to really be able to cryopreserve poetry spam. But however, we have seen some progress made in the last couple of years and what we need to do is to really tap into it and make sure that it compliment the Institute of Conservation Strategies to be able to conserve poetry diversity. Our end here and thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much, Doug, for the wonderful presentation of the situation and the context in the poetry in general and in South Africa in particular. And we can see that despite the different methods of conservation, we still need to be very careful to ensure that we are losing nothing from what is naturally conserved in the villages by our farmers. They respect the farmers who are the real custodians of the genetic resources in their natural environment. So thank you very much and I will allow Dr. Morary to connect. Morary, you are there. You are muted. We can hear you. Good. Yes. Are you getting lost? Fortunately, we can hear you. Can you unmute? Yeah. There may be an issue with his microphone and probably we have to come back to it while he's trying to sort the issue. Maybe we move to, yes, we can hear you. We can hear you. You can hear us, but we can't hear you at all. I don't know if you are using a headset or any device, which may be closed. Okay. While waiting for him to, for Dr. Morary to set his microphone, maybe we can move to the next presentation and I will try to step on the show of Dr. June from the Rossner Institute to present on his behalf. Let me try to share my screen as well. Can you see my screen? Yes. Yes, question. We can see this. Okay. Thank you very much. So I hope Dr. Morary will succeed very soon setting his microphone, then we revert to him after I present on behalf of Dr. June from the Rossner Institute and June was supposed to present on the potential of Pramodian germ cells and surrogacy technology for conservation, restoration and development of multi genetic resources in Southern Africa. So, yes, we almost, all of us, we know about the process since domestications of the poultry from the wild jungle fowl inside East Asia and the process of specializations to obtain the more than 1,600 breed that we have all over the world nowadays. And most of those breed are specialized. Some are still called local, of course, but we have some which are very good professional, developed as layers or as broilers in the different environment. As Farah was mentioning just a few minutes ago, we have a great diversity of poultry genetic resources distributed across the globe. And in Africa as well, we have a great diversity of genetic resources, globally called local chicken, village chickens, et cetera. But when you go deeper into each community, into each agroecological zone, you may see that chickens based on some phenotype or specific features they have, have been assigned different names by local community most of the time. And this may be due probably to the specific needs, how chickens are contributing to the needs of those communities or specific trade they are displaying for them. This is how we can see the vendor, Vambo and the other breed that we just saw from Dr. Farah just a few minutes ago. But in different countries, we also have the same diversity of chicken which are globally called local chicken. So this is a great diversity that we need to tap on to improve productivity and improve the livelihood in our community. Yeah, we improved the livelihood in our communities. Sorry. So unfortunately, we can also observe in the different communities that poultry production is increasingly based on the limited number of breed in different countries. And it means the within breed genetic diversity is dangerously declining. And we also see that most of our communities depends on meat and eggs. So they need to be wearing what we call the multiple purpose or generally the dual purpose breed, but generally in science also and at the global level, sometimes they are undervalued yet. We know that they are trade of adaptability and resistance to some diseases are very important for us to make a sustainable poultry system for our local communities. And Dr. Farah was mentioning a few minutes ago about the issue of adaptability and based on what we need to know what we are conserving in different agroecological zones. And I just wanted to ride on that to present a bit this work done by CTH and Illurie team on ecological niche modeling for delineating livestock ecotypes and exploring environmental genomic adaptation based on the examples of the Ethiopian village chicken where the authors clearly demonstrate that if we are looking for what we need to conserve, we need to go for adaptability trade and also preference and from there based on the different environmental conditions, altitude, latitude, temperatures, et cetera, we should be able based on the criteria that we need in the community to identify where are the niches, where are the genetic resources that we need to conserve to meet specific demands or to also to be sure that we are not losing some important genes that we may need in the future generations. And we have all the diversities, what we presented in Ethiopia can be done in the Botswana, in Malawi, in South Africa, in Lesotho, wherever we are because we have this well adapted ecotype in all of these regions. Unfortunately, they are undergoing a great trade, many trade and most of them, the major ones can be the rapid spread of homogenous large-scale intensive production. Of course, we want to produce for food security in the regions intensively, but that intensification of poultry productions in some areas is seriously threatening the diversity of locally, local and locally adapted ecotypes. Of course, at the country level, sometime original level, we may have this issue of inappropriate development of policies and management strategies to conserve what is really key to us. And the disease outbreaks like the new castle that was also mentioned a few minutes ago and their control strategies and various form of disasters and emergencies. And it is because of this also that I believe some few years ago, FAO was able to put in place a program called large stock emergency guard land and standard to take into consideration that there are of course, non-trades, but some also may be coming like it can be war, can be landslide, it can be a flood or drought, et cetera, which may be affecting this genetic diversity. And that is why we need to factor them when we are planning conservation agendas. And for chicken, conservation is really problematic. For many other livestock and mostly mammals, conservation in situ conservation is very feasible for chicken also that is feasible, but we notice that for livestock, cattle, sheep, goat, pigs, et cetera, we can conserve them through eggs, sperms, embryos, et cetera. For chicken, conserving eggs is absolutely impossible up to now. Conserving sperms also is feasible, but with some challenges. One of the main challenges that so far we can see from the pictures we have here at the bottom, we can see that before freezing sperms, we have just very few dead cells, dead sperms, but after freezing a good percentage of these cells have died. It means conserving sperm for poultry may not be very efficient for sustainable utilization in the future. And the second challenge is that knowing the genetics or the biological constriction of genetic material in the poultry, where the males are almost agotic and the females are heterosagotics. It means when conserving the sperms in poultry, we may be conserving all the genes on the Z chromosomes since the male are ZZ and we are just conserving sperms. It means why conserving sperm which will be losing the genetic information that may be carried by the W chromosomes. And that is very, very challenging for us. And we also see that while conserving and after restoration, we have very low fertility in the different population that may have been conserved. And also, even if you succeed using those ones that escape the fertility challenge covering which using different cross breeding program to recover the native population conserved will be really time consuming. So despite all the tools and facilities we may have for conservations of livestock in general, we still have challenges conserving poultry genetic resources, but we have now the options of using primordial germ cells which is presenting some advantages in the fact large diversity can be conserved in a very small place in a very small tubes and put in liquid nitrogen or other facilities that you have. And it means we can also conserve at the opposite of in situ in vivo conservation. Here we can maintain material in the environment free of pathogens if we consider what Paul mentioned as one of the key element, key component of the bio banking material or conservation document he shared with us, being able to conserve material free of pathogens and also protected against natural hazard, as I mentioned, that's why we have the livestock emergency garden as standard. And large number of chicken can be revived when needed because now it means using the stem cells technology is possible to conserve many cells in the single tube we can pull the material and later on it's possible to reintroduce them in the different processes through different processes that I will present later particularly the solar gate hose technology and revive the population. So here the technologies is based on the fact that it is possible to isolate those germ cells at the earlier stages and crop reserve them and later on re-inject them into the host embryos and from there they should be able to recolonize the gonad of the host and repopulate and at the end we should be able to produce the host maybe producing genetic material from the donor cells. And this is exactly what we can see here. Unfortunately, we cannot see the video but we can see on the right the two, the five, the seven we see how the cells which are here shiny can be colonizing gradually the gonad and really taking place. It means the stem cells or the eggs that should be produced by these individuals should be carrying the genetic material from the conserved population. So to do that there have been three different methods developed. The first two were using the blasto disc or the circulating blood. That is very possible but sometimes it can be challenging because we see that we need to be culturing and propagating the materials before we crop reserve them. This imply hard costs, we need special facilities incubators, et cetera and we also need, we are also undergoing the risk of genetic mutations through hard different passages, et cetera. And at the end, if we succeed, we should be able to cross braid the sterile host and restore the population that was crop reserve at the beginning. But the colleagues from Rosalie Institute, as well as June and Mike McGraw and Yatine has been able to develop and pilot this process of crop preserving embryonic gonad. These are gonad isolated on the nine and they can be pulled and crop reserve directly without the process of culturing. It means this is low cost can be done at the regional level with minimal, having minimal facilities. So the technologies is low and we are also skipping the risk of mutations. And as I mentioned earlier, we can pull genetic material all together and be able to re-inject in the host and restore the population that we are producing. And this is what from here at Illuri Nairobi, we have been doing with the KALRO. This is the Kenya Agricultural and Livestock Research Organizations. Before we are being able to isolate either primordial jumps, blasto discs, or circulating blood or gonad from these populations. These are eco-type of chicken in Kenya. And we have them now in the biorepository and from time to time, we can collect them from the biorepository, re-inject them in a host we are using as a host now, the white-legged eggs. And at the end, we can produce these chicks which at the earlier stages of the recession are carmeras. You can see them, the white-legged, but with some level of colonizations of the local chicken and we have it at the phenotypes. And this is a work in progress and we have a good collaboration then with KALRO and we can also have approval from the National Biosafety Authority of Kenya to move to the next step using the surrogate host which is a gene-edited animal. The gene addition of this animal, genetic addition of these animals has just been made to silence the capacity of this host to produce their own stem cells. And later on, when we re-inject the cells of the donor of the local chicken, only those cells will be colonizing the gonad. It means that would not be the competition that created the carmeras. And at the end, we should be able to produce 100% pure offsprings. So steroid males and steroid females chicken eggs have been implanted with reproductive cells from donor's blood and the resulting chicks meted together to produce chicks of the donor breed. This is just an illustration of what is going on. This is, these are pictures taken from the lab and you can see the surrogate host here with the ICA space nine, this is gene-edited. And in a non-treated embryo, we can see that the primordial cells are distributed in the gonad. But with the drug-treated embryo, this is one having the baby drug which is just a substance which is destroying the capacity of the chicken also to produce the stem cells. We can see that now the gonads are really free of the primordial gem cells. And then when we inject the cells of the donors of the local chicken, they are able to colonize the gonad. We can see here in the male gonad, remember the males when we are looking in the microscope, the gonads are having the same size, but in the females, you can see that difference in the size of gonads. And you can see how they are fully colonized now by the cells. And to demonstrate that it is possible, the experiments are also, the chicks produced have been hatched and transferred and tried to breed. And we can see that the performance, first the survival is still perfect, 65 to 68% survivability and the number and sex of hatching that we have them here and the distribution. The only difference is that sometime we need to enrich when we are having females, remember that the females are having mostly one big gonad and the small one, while the males are having two comparable gonad size, it means the quantity of cells we may be having from the males are totally different from what we may have from the females. But at the end, we have this relatively similar proportion of chicks obtains at the end. And it is also demonstrated through the different lab experiment that though we are using gene-edited material, the offspring we are having, 100% local chickens are having nothing of the transients that is produced. It means these offspring obtain a really pure local chickens, we should be pure local chicken restored in the different, it can be different populations or not. And these are examples of pictures, what is obtained, and you can see that these surrogate parents, males and females, which cells are being injected, which eggs are being injected, the cells of this line are producing exactly what we wanted at the beginning. The same here with this red breed, but producing as offspring, the Sussex that was kept preserved and restored from the liquid nitrogen. So this is really what is going on and what is one to transfer from CTIGH and Illry and the Pagmas Rosley Institute, University of Edinburgh, to the national system in Africa to ensure sustainability of conservations and keeping exactly the material that we want. Remember, I mentioned that we are doing this in collaboration also in Kenya with KALRO. And KALRO has started a breeding program sometimes, but and we can see how the flock has been growing. The breeding flock at KALRO has been growing from 2018 to today, we'll almost 80,000 breeding on station currently. But despite the quantity of chicks they can produce and disseminate on an annual basis, they are not yet able to meet the demand the demand at the country level within Kenya for the different counties. So it is very important now that if we are using the both biological machinery of professional layers, remember some of the layers are producing up to 300 eggs and more per year. While our local chicken may be producing maximum 100. It means we use the body machinery of these professional layers and surrogate hosts and we should be able to restore the populations and to proceed to intensive disseminations of elite locally adapted chicken genetic resources within the tropics and meet then the demands of our farmers. We also know that most of our farmers may not engage into professional poultry breeding because the breed we have may not be locally adapted to their production systems and to their environment. But if we have a locally adapted surrogate host, it means we can even produce at high level chicken genetic resources in very challenging areas in Africa. And this is what CTAG is the tropical poultry genetic solutions of early TPGS are trying to do to ensure that we make business from these technologies. And of course, we mentioned we shouldn't be disseminating like that, but also what we have in the biorepository and gene banks is to support research and development. For functional genomic adaptations, explore the genetic material of this biobank chicken for functional annotation, gene expression data, protein structure, metabolite, et cetera, and to be able to produce whatever we want or whatever our community need. So it is very important to know that it is possible to use this biobank material, apply the different tools that we have and produce through genomic assisted breeding based to produce these improved lines, which should be what our agroecology, our production systems, our farmer skills should be able to endorse and transform their life. And since 2019, we have been trying to do this. Of course, we've support from AUIBA and with CalRO, this is the transfer of technology to the national system. We have here our colleagues from CalRO working almost 100% time also, 80% time at Illry in the lab where the facilities are, but working on these different equal type of CalRO that we saw earlier to ensure that the material is biobanked and is supporting the development, research for development or the different line that we saw from CalRO in the previous slide. So thank you very much. This is exactly what we are trying to transfer also to Southern Africa and we thank our different donors, the FCDOO Bill and Melinda Gate VBRC, Jesse Oversea and the CARB were being supporting it. We also turned the partners for the Center for Tropical Laster Genetics and Health and the local partners, TPGS, CalRO, Africa Union and the National Center for the Replacement and Refinement and Reduction, which is showing that it is possible instead of using live animals, which is very costly, difficult to maintain for different experiments, we can still use the cells of those animals in petrigesis and obtain the same result that we want to produce. So thank you very much for your attention and we hope that through that and we feel we should be able to improve life of our key custodians of animal genetic resources. Thanks. Thank you, Christian. I wonder if we can take one question before we proceed. Yes, I think so. All right, so I think there is a question in the chat about I think this was prompted by the presentation from Farai and I don't know if Edgar wants to go through it or I'll just read it so that we can move on. So Edgar is saying, because I think Farai had mentioned something about the lack of inability to bring some of the preserved animals back to life or to sustain them for a long time, they lose them. And Edgar is saying one of the problems that is facing African cryopreservation or conservation of genetic resources, the lack of genetics, sorry, expertise in genetics that kind of pin some of these activities. And I think his question is if there are efforts for regional postgraduate programs on conservation. I know you have, Christian mentioned a bit about capacity building efforts. And I wonder if you can take on this and just to expand it more so that Edgar can feel that his question has been answered. Yeah, regarding the capacity building effort, right? Yes. Yes, as I mentioned, and I wish Mary was there to present a bit of what they put in place from A.U. and the A.U. I.I. bar as a traditional gene balance. And since 2019, Erie has been working with them to ensure that these technologies develop between Erie, C.T.L.H, Rosley, H.T.T., etc. are transferred to the NAS. And this is how in 2019 we had the first training on bio banking here at Erie. But later on, there were also a few follow-up trainings at the regional levels, particularly in countries which determine poultry, chicken as their priority, value chain for food security and poverty alleviations. So we started the trainings, but because of limited resources, that time was not possible to really reach all the regions in Africa. But now with C.T.L.H. Asia phase two, we are extending this training and this capacity building. We started with this webinar series, first to identify the key disorder within the regions. We did it in Southeast Asia. We did it also in East Africa last month. And this month we are working with Southern Africa. And the objective is to make sure that from here we move to the wet lab training on bio banking and effective conservations of local animal genetic resources and local chicken genetic resources from the regions, from what countries will have identified as farmer preferred breed or as priority breed for the local poultry industry. So this is a bit of what we are doing. And we hope that using these technologies, we should be able to multiply the genetic resources within the regions and meet the demand. So I hope I'm bringing a supplement and a complementary information to the question that was sent. Yes, thank question. I guess the challenge and back to the question is the postgraduate programs, I don't think there is a capacity within, say, the city of GH to initiate a degree programs, if that's what the question is about. But I guess whenever most of these things are normally initiated based on needs, so like master's programs and stuff like that. And as the need, it's becoming one more parent that probably this is something that needs to be picked at the national level. And when this becomes a parent, I think most of the local universities in collaborations with the partners abroad might have to start to think about having postgraduate program. But I think at the moment, unless within individual projects like the one that Mike McGrew is involved in, they wouldn't be like a national or an elaborate program to train postgraduate scientists to train people at the postgraduate level on conservation and genetics of animal breeding. But they are wider programs within universities, both local, within Africa, and even here in Edinburgh on animal breeding and genetics, which then can then incorporate programs like conservation, but those will be within individual programs like, as I said, the one that Mike is running. All right, I think that will be that unless there is another any other... Yeah, we have a hand from Farah. Okay, sorry, Farah. Yeah, thanks, Moser, thanks, Christian. Yeah, I just want to say as well, compliment to the other capacity that you did indicate, Christian, and also to the issue of covering the gap of postgraduate students having access to these technologies. One example that we have, and I've seen it in a number of NASS to say, you know, whilst the national agricultural research institutions, they have the capacity and they have the resources in terms of bio-banking and all that, them partnering with universities and being able to train, to collaborate in training and capacity building of these postgraduate students is one model that can actually work. So for the agricultural research council, we have what we call a professional development program where we bring postgraduate students from the university, then they have access to all the technologies that are in the NASS, and then they would still be able to undertake their postgraduate studies, whether it's an MSc or a PhD registered with the collaborating university. Then that way, resources that are shared, the technologies can be accessed in the students, then have the ability to actually undertake and have capacity built in those applied research programs. One thing that it also actually adds value to is them having the ability to access farming communities which certain times universities might not have, but the NASS would have access to that. Thank you. All right, thank you for that clarification. We have one more question from Paul, and he's asking, are there currently elite, locally adapted chicken populations to multiply through this technology? I think that is in reference to your presentation, one more question. Yeah. If there are elite populations to be co-preserved using these technologies, yes, what Colorado is already doing? Of course, Colorado is co-preserving the locally adapted ecotypes of Kenya from different counties, different challenging environments also, but Colorado has developed what they call the KC1, KC2, and now the KC3 lines, which are dual-propose breed. And you may have seen in our presentation that they are also crowd-preserved to ensure that while we are moving from one generation to another, we are keeping all the background information and five years, 10 years later, we may have to go back and source some gene from the original population. So it is possible to have these elite populations and I presented also the result from the Olivier Steam from Ethiopia, where through their mapping and their modeling, they are able to identify some locally adapted ecotypes. It can be based on the altitude and the temperature on the level of oxygens and adaptability or productivity in the regions. So this is one thing, a journey we need also to start to ensure that even if now we are still calling some of them local chicken, et cetera, some are really already identifying like we have in Ethiopia, still in Ethiopia, the daisy chicken, the horror chicken, we have in South Africa, the ovumbo and the other chicken that exists, we have in Nigeria, those breeds which are being through, which are TPGS or ACGG, African Chicken Genetic again, has been working with our bioquita universities and others. So this can be preserved because some are already certified as breed or as line and released by the national authorities as a breed. So this can be car preserved using these technologies while we are still exploring some others which are in the nature. Okay, thanks, Christian. Can I just ask one last question here for Farai and Christian. So Christian, you say there is a possibility to then take these technologies and apply them to other regions. And Farai mentioned the idea of them having, you know, preservation protocols that maybe sometimes don't work as well. What would be the limiting factor for you, Christian, to transfer these technologies to places like where Farai is in South Africa? And Farai, from your point of view, what would be the bottlenecks in absolving such technologies for your systems? Yeah, if I can start, I would say this webinar today is just the beginning of us transferring this technology to Southern Africa, including to agricultural research council in South Africa to ensure that this technology can be used to car preserve or to support the car preservations for that they have already in place. Of course, when we are doing this, we are doing within the limited budget that we have at early, but our CTGAGH, but we just need to work together to mobilize more resources and ensure that the technology is fully transferred. In the next phase, the next, the coming month, we will have to work with Farai and Moriri and the others in Southern Africa to make sure that, yes, we have effective wet lab training. In Southern Africa, it can be in Botswana, it can be in South Africa, it can be in any other countries which is offering, which is having at least the minimum facilities and we ensure that we have people equipped within the regions trained as trainers to apply the technologies and really conserve. Then from there, we see how to escalate to a few countries and to the whole regions. Probably we may also have to approach the regional economic communities and some other instances in the regions to see how they can support the initiatives for us to fully transfer the technology to the ground. Yes, please. Okay, thank you, Krishan, thank you most. So in terms of, I think in terms of the challenges in the bottlenecks, I think Krishan has articulated that it's capacity, it's budget and this collaboration, if you know, the EURI, the CTLGH can then roll out this technology through trainer or trainers, then that would really ensure that the impact reaches out to every stakeholder, not only in South Africa, but I think Southern Africa and Africa is a continent. I think the advantage that comes is a lot of whether it's NAS or other research institutions, they have some basic gemplasm collection and conservation capacity. And so, you know, you can actually train people in their own countries and, you know, customizing it to meet their needs. But what I would see as a bottleneck and not only I think for the continent, I think regardless of where you are, the diversity that we find in poetry genetic resources is huge and building the physical capacity to store that would be a challenge. And I think it goes to what Poe has alluded to in his earlier remarks, you know, the need to actually characterize this diversity and the need to know what's unique and what needs to be conserved and to prioritize what needs to be conserved. I think that needs to be done. Also, you know, as a bio banking or preservation unit, it's too prone to the risks that can be found, you know, this can be bent down, this can be destroyed, this can be affected by so many unknown factors. So there's need for backup, there's need to make sure that we really have structures that complement each other, that backup each other and that make sure that the resources are used efficiently. So in my point of view, we need to protect ourselves also to ensure that we don't duplicate efforts, but we complement efforts that are happening at national level in terms of the previous preservation of any diversity that needs to be conserved. Thank you. Thank you very much. I think that's good to know because sometimes we move forward all straight without thinking what would be the challenge and sometimes you need to carry those along with you as you're deciding some of these things. I'll give it back to you, Christian, to proceed with the next set of statements. Yeah, thank you very much, Musa. I don't know if Moriri has fixed the issue of the microphone. Yeah, I think it should be fine now. Okay, thank you. Thank you very much, Moriri. One, you should be loading your presentation. Allow me to introduce you to the participant. Is that okay? Yes, sir. Okay. So thank you, thank you for facing that. Yes, allow me, just give me a few minutes, a few seconds to introduce you to the participant. So you are Dr. Tom Boden. His term is a group leader in the division of functional genetics at the Russell Institute, where he establishes his lab in the 2002 investigating the control of growth and differentiation of embryo derived stem cells. And his lab's research interest center on the regulation of growth and differentiation of pre-reported embryonic stem cells and the illustrating new mechanisms that control cell renewal and pre-reportency. And currently his team continues these basic studies and extending their work to developing novel stem cell system for directed differentiations and the functional analysis of genetic variations in lab stuff and wildlife species. So today Tom will be presenting on the potential of pre-reported stem cells and these technologies for conservations of local animal genetic resources. So in just pre-reported stem cells as living cell bank for the studies and conservations of wildlife and domestic animal. Please Tom, you have the floor. Okay, thank you. So can you see the full screen, yes? No. Yeah, we can see. Can you put on full screen? I should have it. It's, you can see, or can you just see the presentation? Can you see the presentation mode? Yeah, we can see, not on presentation mode. We see the... Tom, you just missed it down there. Down. Yeah, I mean, that's on my other screen. So I wonder why that's, because I didn't seem to have this problem before. Well, should I just carry on anyway? You can just, you can see the screen, can't you, anyway? Yeah, that's fine. Yeah, okay. Right, well, I apologize for the confusion at the beginning. It seems to me my talks are cursed. I think the last one, sorry. No, it's okay, it's okay. I think I was stuck in a snowstorm in Minneapolis last time and wasn't able to get a presentation to you and you can see the date on this is all wrong. So anyway, right. Well, thank you for inviting me, Christianne. And I have to say I was very impressed by your talk about the surrogate chickens, because I suppose that was a beautiful demonstration of the conservation tools that can be developed. So our approach has been a little bit different. So I have to say that our work is really rather conservation light and is more focused on trying to develop systems to study the genetics and the molecular biology of livestock species. So this is what we have been working on for the last five or six years. It's a concept called what we call livestock in a dish. And the idea behind this is to basically using sort of an NC3Rs type of approach to try and develop cell culture systems where we can study livestock biology essentially without having to do the animal experiments or at least compliment the animal experiments. And so what you can see there are animals in a dish and a variety of cell types that one might be interested in trying to study. And the two sort of scientific objectives under this are really what we'd like to use in cell culture systems, which are appropriate. We'd like to identify genes that underline important livestock phenotypes. And also we'd also like to understand and see if we can use the cells to model healthy and disease states in animals. And so basically we've been trying to extend this more recently to not only cover livestock cell, livestock species, but also we've had an opportunity to extend this to some wild species as well. And this is something I'm particularly interested in because I'm excited by the prospects of being able to understand, learn things about the interesting phenotypes and genetics of these wild species, some of which are the wild, essentially sisters of the domesticated species. So we can understand something about domestication, but we can also understand things about their particular phenotypes that these wild animals have. So this is what we've been working on for the last two or three years, I would say. And the outputs that we hope to develop from this approach are essentially two-fold. Well, the main output is that we can generate a living biological resource. So this is a resource that we can share with other people and people can use it in other labs. And the priority for us at the moment is trying to use them to understand the science, to understand the biology of both domesticated and wild species. What we would like to do in the future is also expand this to using these cell types that we've regenerate also to play a role in conservation of particularly wild species. That's something that I would dream about. So the kind of scientific questions that we think are interesting that we could address and I'm sure there are more than this, but these are the ones that have come to mind, but in terms of being able to do this kind of comparative biology, comparing both domesticated and the wild species, is really to understand more deeply what the relationship is between the genes and the phenotype. And the outputs that we think are useful are understanding animal health generally. So I'm saying disease susceptibility and resistance and this can apply both to the wild animals as well as the domesticated. We can understand more about how to improve livestock productivity because domestication in some cases has been a loss of phenotype or loss of genetics as well as the gain of productivity potentially. We're also interested in understanding the genetics of environmental adaptation and domestication. And finally, where we'd like to go and we aren't there yet, but I think the field is rapidly developing and that is how to use conservation and reproductive technologies to make use of this living biobank essentially and end up with an archive essentially of the genetic diversity that is present in both wild and domesticated species. So the cornerstone of all of this work, and this is really, I mean, I think it's been mentioned several times and a number of these talks today, is really getting hold off and being able to archive living cells. This is absolutely critical, whether they're PGCs or even in some cases just biopsy material or other reproductive tissues. But the crucial thing is really getting living cells. Having the genetic code for an animal is interesting and useful, but essentially is not much use if the animals are gone. So we really need to archive the cells. So basically the procedure that we're working on is basically be able to get cells from live tissue biopsies, can establish primary cultures, those are those things here, and then expand them into a population of cells that can then be archived and safely frozen down. The problem for a lot of the somatic cells that one could do this with, for example fibroblasts is although you can preserve them like this and they have a limited lifespan. So this is an absolute key problem. They also will tend to display really just the phenotype of that cell type. So essentially you're limited in terms of the kind of biological questions you can ask. And also because of limited time lifespan, they're actually quite, they're very difficult to do sophisticated genetic manipulations because basically you can't expand them for long enough to actually study them. So our approach to get around this is essentially to harness a stem cell technology that was invented probably more than 40 years ago and harness pluripotency really. And so this slide just shows that here. So essentially this is a technology that was invented 40 years ago. I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with this. So basically if you take a mouse, take the embryo from a mouse, the blastocyst, then what was shown a long time ago was that you could basically, if you got the conditions right, you could grow this small patch of cells here, the inner cell mass out in culture and create immortal cultures of cells that last forever essentially. And this is what this is here. This is a colony of embryonic stem cells, probably several hundreds of cells there. And the beauty is that this system and the quite extraordinary thing about them is that you can grow them essentially forever. They have a natural immortality not the capacity for this. And you can basically then in vitro, you can differentiate them if you change their growth conditions so that it promotes differentiation, you can convert them into a variety. In fact, in theory, into all the fetal tissues that are generated during development from a blastocyst. But the most remarkable thing was that these cells, even though you could keep them in culture and you could genetically manipulate them in the mouse, at least, when you reintroduce them into an embryo, they would recolonize the animal, the fetus, and give rise essentially to an animal which could transmit the ESL through the germline. So basically, despite being in culture for such a long time, this natural immortality is relatively stable and retains the capacity for differentiation, what we call pluripotency. So essentially they represent an unlimited resource of differentiated cells or stem cells and the differentiated cells. So this was developed in mouse more than 40 years ago and our ambition was really to use this technology as best we could in livestock species. However, there's another technology which I just want to touch on, which really is central to our work, which was an invention that was made around about 2006. I think it was from Yamenaka's lab in Japan where they discovered a way of converting somatic cells back into this embryonic state. So basically what they showed was that you could take a tissue biopsy, you could grow the cells from it, and then by treating the cells, those somatic cells with stem cell factors, you could basically rewind them back to the embryonic state and that's what's called an induced pluripotent stem cell, it's IPS reprogramming. And those cells, now that they've been wound back to a stem cell state are now immortal. So you can grow these forever essentially. And what they can do is essentially provide an unlimited source for a variety of progenitor cells that are generated normally during embryonic development and then a whole host of embryonic differentiated cells that one can produce. So this is a key technology for us. This ability to be able to take a somatic cell, so it could be from a patch of skin or whatever, and be able to basically reprogram them back to the stem cell state and then basically bank them as a mortal cell line. So just as an example of the kind of experiment we've done in the lab, here's a process, this is far more exciting in the animation, but unfortunately I don't have that. Here, here we have an animal. This is a Red River hog that we got a tiny patch of skin cells from an operation that the Red River hog was undergoing at a local zoo. We took the tissue, we then ex-planted this tissue into culture and we generated cultures of fibroblast cells. Now these fibroblast cells would normally grow for only say 10, 20 passages, but when we took them, we got them early enough, we then reprogrammed them with the stem cell factors and generated these cultures of IPS cells. So this is again, this is a colony here of the Red River hog IPS cells. There's hundreds of cells there. They grow very tight in that cluster and essentially then we could use those, we could expand them, bank them, freeze them down and then we could at will, whenever we thought them we could then create a variety of different cell types from those Red River hog cells. So essentially this animal that we took this out, that we took this tiny little bit of tissue from during it was getting castrated, unfortunately for it. That's still running around in the zoo, it's perfectly alive while we are experimenting on the cells in the lab. So what I can show, hopefully these videos will show you. So this is just an illustration in this slide of the functionality of the cells that we have. So hopefully we'll see a video. So basically what we have here, this is something that we get in there are some of our cultures when they're differentiating. These are some electrically coupled cardiomyocytes. So I hope you can see that and you can see the beating of the cells. So these are spontaneously patched of cardiomyocytes that came from the Red River hog. So essentially we're making heart in vitro. The other example here is where we've taken the cells and we've pushed them down to make hematopoietic cells or blood cells and then we've differentiated them into macrophages. And so this video here is a field of macrophages that we've generated from the Red River hog tissue, the IPS cells. And we then incubated those cells with little particles that essentially when they get ingested or phagocytose by the macrophages which of course are very active phagocytes, those particles then change their color into fluorescent red when they get ingested into an acidic environment such as the lysosome or phagosome. So that what you'll see hopefully as the video runs and the cells move around, they become increasingly fluorescent and you can see the red cells there. So it's showing that they're very active, what we think are normal macrophages. Okay. So now I'm just going to tell you about a project which we have got undergoing in the lab, which is maybe closer to some of your interests. And that is really a disease that's a great concern, not only in Africa, but also across the world and particularly in Asia recently where it caused a major problem for pig farming. So that's African swine fever virus. And so the heart of this is that domesticated pigs are killed very, very quickly by African swine fever virus. They basically have a massive hemorrhagic fever and the pigs are killed within seven to 10 days. However, in Africa, many of the wild pigs or wild suites I should say, there are no pigs strictly speaking, are capable of carrying the virus, they get infected but they're tolerant of African swine fever virus. So the sort of archetypal example of this is this beast here, the warthog. And so we are interested in really it, what is it about the warthog genetics which allows it to coexist with the virus whereas the domesticated pig gets so ill. And that was something that we're really interested in trying to understand. And so essentially what PhD student Tom Watson in the lab did is he derived a number of IPS cells. So these are stem cell lines from fibroblast cultures that we've isolated from a variety of different pigs. So here we have a domesticated pig and these little colonies here are the pig IPS cells. We have, we got a bit of a sample of a wild boar which is essentially a wild version of the domesticated pig. It's the same species. And you can see here's a little colony of the wild boar IPS cells that Tom made. We have some Red River Hog IPS cells here and also more recently, very recently we started making some IPS cells from warthog. These are lagging somewhat behind so we don't actually have them quite at the same stage but essentially these three types we've been working on in the lab for quite some time. And so essentially the experiment, I'm not gonna show you any data yet because it's still work underway but essentially what we do is we take IPS cells from those two different species. We then convert them into macrophages. Now macrophages are the normal natural host for African swine fever virus. And so with our collaborators down at APHA or in the perbite institutes down near, sorry, they do the ASFE infections for us because it's SAPO4, we can't do them ourselves. And we're basically looking at how effective are the cells? What's the host cell responses to infection? And really can we understand something about the genetics underlying disease resistance as it pertains to macrophages? That's making assumption that some of the important biology is happening in the cells that the ASFE infects. So that's the status of those experiments. So really back to our outputs and impact, we think that comparing domesticated species and wild species has a lot going for it in terms of understanding the comparative biology or the genetics underpinning the differences between these species. Our focus at the moment is very much on science, I understand the molecular genetics and the genetics basis of some of the differences. However, in the future, of course, in the same way that PGCs can be used in reproduction, there are protocols now available for mouse stem cells and I'm talking about pluripotent stem cells where one can make gametes from those stem cells. This is a technology that's very much in its infancy in terms of other species, but it's something that is probably going to be the future that so that basically these embryonic stem cells or IPS cells are going to be a potential resource for generating gametes and therefore archiving animals, essentially in a freezer. Okay, that's my talk. Thank you very much. Wonderful, wonderful. Thank you very much, Tom, for this presentation, which is really showing us how important it is to use these stem cells technologies and I'm sure is giving ideas also to the end users and the national systems, particularly these aspects of in vitro spermato genesis that you mentioned at the end and how we can be just using skin snips or collecting fiber blasts, inducing pluripotency and differentiating them into any type of cells, any type of material we want for our different experiment and this is why it is really called lash talk in the dish and it's important. It is in the line of the three R research and it means cutting down the cost of experimentations, the cost of conservations, et cetera, et cetera. So thank you very much, Tom, for that wonderful presentation. I don't know if you have... Moussa, do we have questions, no? We don't have questions at the moment, but I think what I will just highlight for the people, we look at this from the point of view as in conservation of African national genetic resources that you can see from Tom's talk there is also potential to exploit the genetic resources in Africa to understand some of these complex issues like animal resistance to diseases and Africa will probably have some of these exotic species that actually are more resistant to some of these emerging pathogens and if we can with things like the technologies that Tom has just highlighted, we can generate resources from them that can be used also, not just in preservation but also to understand some of the long-term studying issues in disease pathogenesis. But, Moussa, are you getting us now very well? Okay, let me try it again. Yes, please. Yeah. Does it appear over there? Still not, no. Oh, that's where the problem is now. Okay, maybe you can share that with myself or Moussa and he will be able to load on your behalf. Oh, yes. Yeah. And in the meantime, maybe Hamot could step in. Yes, yes. And maybe his presentation. Yeah, because I also have to leave at half past to get a train. Yeah. Yeah, please. Thank you. Oh, then now it works on my side. Yeah. Okay. So you should. Wonderful. You can put it on presentation mode. Yes. Excellent. Yeah. Great. Yes. Please, Hamot, thank you. And thank you very much. I'm taking time to be with us and to show us the importance of access and benefit sharing because all this material we're talking about the source from the different researchers and imaginary resources in the region is to support research. It means it can easily be moving from South Africa to Botswana to Malawi, Zimbabwe, etc. And we need to be complying. So for me to introduce you to participants. Hamot. Hamot is a worker senior advisor for the multi multi-dominant global project ABS capacity development initiative implemented by GIZ since 2013 and Hamot support African partners countries in the implementations of the Nagoya protocol. For example, we have the development of institutional and administrative framework. Negotiation of ABS contract enabling the participation of indigenous people and local community while the real custodians of these genetic resources in the access and benefit sharing process and also supporting biodiversity based value chains. So Hamot advices the German Federal Ministry of Development and Economic Cooperation as well as international and regional organizations like AU Commission, AUI by the regional economic communities on access and benefit sharing issues. And Hamot followed the international ABS discussion since 2019, 1998. Yes, and he has been supporting a lot of project. He studied biology and specialized in plant biochemistry and molecular biology and for his diploma and PhD thesis at the German University of Göttingen. And in his post-doc position, he focused on soil microbiology and biochemistry in the German Center for Forest ecosystem research. So while talking about the regulatory and the policy aspect, Hamot also fully understand the fundamentals of biology and the importance of using this material. So please Hamot, you have the floor to discuss and share with us the regional strategy for conservation of local and imaginative resources on the pathway for access and benefit sharing. And we have protocol compliance for imaginative resources. Thank you very much Hamot, you have the floor. Yes, thanks a lot Christian for inviting me and then continuing our now long-standing cooperation with Ilri and the various projects you have. Well, I will be brief and just give an overview about applicable ABS frameworks and ABS obligations to your projects. While I'm not going into detail but just actually giving an overview and then of course we could then see how it will work out in actually accessing these resources. I would just like to remind you of the Convention of Biological Diversity which was adopted in 1992 already and of course now it has a Nagoya protocol adopted in 2010 which specifies the third aim of this convention and that is what in terms of ABS is important. The first aim is the conservation of biological diversity. Second, the sustainable use of its component and the third aim is the fair and equitable sharing of benefits from the utilization of genetic resources and there are the convention links this to three very distinct topics. Issues first, there should be appropriate access to genetic resources by the providing countries. It is linked to the appropriate transfer of technology and know-how by the user and then it comes to the more monetary side of beneficiary. There should be appropriate funding like upfront payments, milestone payments or license fees and royalties that especially of course refers to more commercial research than basic research or university research. This is a policy framework against I like to discuss the topics today. The Nagoya protocol then specifies a bit more what it is about. It says genetic resources have to be on the territory of the member states and it is the benefits arising from the utilization of such resources which then triggers the beneficiary obligation and genetic resources actually means any material of biological origin that contains genetic elements, DNA, etc. Also stem cells for example in your area of research or blood samples with very broad definition what genetic resources are. Also that might, I don't know that might not actually fit to your project the Nagoya protocol also says if researchers access associated traditional knowledge that is actually connected with the use of genetic resources and deeper knowledge about it then also the access and beneficiary rules would apply and it defines what actually utilization is because the convention of biological diversity doesn't specify that. So the Nagoya protocol says that the utilization is any research and development on genetic and biochemical composition of the genetic resource and I think this then will fully apply to a lot and if not all research projects under the ileri roof because you are actually looking into genetics, you do breeding, etc. that is so the risk for your protocol scope and thus of course also under national legislation which of course has to be adopted. So what are the general issues for ileri and all connected projects of course it is that the research on genetic resources on breeding is ongoing and as we see in the last many years it is very much on genetics on molecular technologies on what we now call the digital sequencing information on sequencing genomes and using data, etc. What are you doing? Many researchers have the understanding of course that wild animal, wild genetic resources would be under the Nagoya protocol under the CBD and many think that if you use domesticated animals which in most cases are actually privately owned by farmers and the ABS rules are not applying which actually is not true because the Nagoya protocol first doesn't differentiate between public and private genetic resources in each genetic resource whether it belongs to the state in protected area or to a farmer and then when you come from the agriculture field as many of you do you often refer to this international treaty on plant genetic resources which has a certain list of plant genetic resources which are exempt from the Nagoya system but this actually only refers to these plants and they don't have any international agreement on access and beneficiary with regard to animal genetic resources which are used for food and agriculture and culture so by default all these cows and chicken and pigs whatever you like to access and do a research on by default they are under the national ABS system developed by the Nagoya protocol and meaning that in first case they are usually under environmental ministries which is not exactly those ministries which you are in contact with because usually you work with agriculture ministries and that in the end and this is what we know from the practice of a lot of URI project poses a significant challenge to the scientific practice because those Sunday need to work with other ministries than you are used to as I said the Nagoya protocol and the convention of biological diversity set the international legal framework but these international laws are not applicable to the activities of institutions of persons etc and only when countries adopt and then implement national ABS regulation that is a legal obligation then to comply with these regulations in the respective countries and I would like to handful a bit more African countries actually have ABS regulations or I guess laws I just listed some of them Spino, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Kenya Madagascar Malawi Namibia, Uganda, South Africa there are some more and in some countries these laws are under development so if you want to source your samples from those countries you need to go through the respective ABS regulation meaning you need a prior and from consent you need to do an ABS contract that specifies the beneficiary and you need an ABS permit but the Nagoya protocol not only regulates access to resources it also sets up an international compliance system because for example if you source the resource in Kenya and you undertake the research outside of Kenya of course the national regulations in Kenya they don't apply and that was a problem for a lot of these provider countries that they had their national regulations but for example the research was undertaken in the UK which is the case in section of projects under the Hillary roof Kenya didn't have any possibility to really interfere with that with the benefits he said that changed with the Nagoya protocol and the EU developed ABS compliance regulations which says that any user in the EU who uses genetic resources from a country with ABS regulation must prove the legal access so they must be able to show all their influence that regulation was done when the UK was still in the EU now when it's separate it kept their rules also in the UK there is ABS compliance as a compulsory requirement and Norway and Switzerland have the rules until now African countries although they went for access regulations they don't have compliance parts in these regulations so their countries wouldn't ask for compliance with ABS regulations in their let's say neighbour countries but when you go to Europe or UK you need to be able to show that and especially and I think this is something which is important also for projects of your kind is the Nagoya protocol doesn't deal with Exito collections directly but it's the EU guidance on their compliance regulations say that I just copied the legal text which essentially says that if you access genetic resources in an Exito collection and when the genetic resources in this Exito collections have been actually collected in the country of the collection so that is for example the collections at if the samples in those Exito collections were collected in Kenya there are also many others which I know then you actually when you access them now in the Exito collection it is seen at least by the EU as an access to a resource from Kenya regardless when it was collected so you still need to have a Kenyan ABS documents if you go if you get Kenyan genetic resources from an Exito collection in Kenya that would also apply to all other countries when you look at it from the view of the European ABS guidance that is something also projects have to be aware and also the institutions running the Exito collections so to make a final a final summary of all that it is that and I might sound a bit drastic but I think that's actually the reality which universities and other institutions are facing now that usually if a country has ABS legislation and requires the plan from consent, the ABS contract and the permit any violation of these laws or regulations are usually seen as a crime that might bring you in some problems if you don't follow these ABS legislation and then also I referred to the compliance regulation in the EU meaning if you go to the EU with samples where you should have ABS documents and you don't have them that research is regarded as illegal and they have in cases reported that researchers from Africa were sent back because they arrived at European universities with samples for example from Kenya where they didn't have their appropriate documents and that is something you also need to contemplate and spend a lot of work on that and develop protocols that are to guarantee that the research actually is illegal and it also has a second angle also the commercialization of products from such utilization would be illegal in the EU meaning and I don't know whether that is the intention of your projects but that was the intention of other projects which we worked together but if commercialization of products would happen in the EU also these companies which are doing the commercialization they also need to be able to prove that the original access and the research was actually under ABS rules. That's a quite demanding legal framework from both sites we see that also other countries are in the process of updating the ABS legislation and I think it's just fair to say that public and private entities also the companies involved in let's say in your case reading just must adapt to this new legal environments to keep the standards of reputation and to be able in the end to do the business although in the beginning I was let's say a bit bad on telling you that a lot of countries see this as a crime or as an offense but in practice it is the case and we know for example that if there is illegal access if there was research not compliant with the rules a lot of countries are not really interested in bringing this to court whatever because a lot of countries of course know about the value of research and the value of cooperation so usually it is possibly and also welcome to also in the future perspective and get the ABS documents and negotiate the contracts to make non-compliant research compliant because and I think this is also a good development in the last last years that countries actually you introduced corporations and well that's pretty brief introduction in this topic what I like to underline and this I think is a very good development is that we cooperated with Ilri since a very long time and this resulted in in good awareness of Ilri in processes and rules to ensure that this challenges of ABS especially when you go to many different countries are actually met and that research can proceed in a smooth way so on that is where we also like to continue our cooperation with Ilri and Ilri's partners to secure that research and reading and actually in the end the sustainable use of genetic resources will continue in Africa and also for Africa of course. Thank you very much Hamad. For the wonderful presentations and awareness and thank you also for standing on our side seeing so long and working with us on the different step that we have been trying to make on compliance and making sure that all the access that genetic resources for research and development that we are doing really complying to the national international framework regarding the for the access and benefit sharing and it is very important what you are also presenting here today for our partners, national partners and regional partners from Southern Africa to understand that for these genetic resources to benefit to the local communities or the custodians who have been keeping them for us we need to also ensure that we researchers we are complying that the partners are also complying and this is through the national systems of course and if any time we have challenges in the countries we can still reach references like Hamot and other partners like Ilri which can still be introducing you to those who should be able to advise on the approach to make sure that the benefits are really shared by the users and the providers of genetic resources so thank you very much and on that we really hope that we should be able to work together with the national partners and the regional partners in Southern Africa to access first on the genetic resources to support a different research that Moussa Tom and everybody will be doing in collaboration with you in the regions and also preserving that genetic material that will be serving the future generations so thank you Hamot and I don't know Murari you share your presentation with Moussa and myself if that is done I did this with you ah ok so let me open it then I will ok then I will display it and lead for you right and I would like to say goodbye because I need to catch my train back to Frankfurt ok thank you very much so I send you my presentation yes yes yes wish you further good webinar and fruitful cooperation so we see you soon in Nairobi thank you we will see you soon in Nairobi and have a nice trip back to Frankfurt yes thank you bye bye so let me try to share the screen from Murari can you see it it's a PowerPoint document can you see it yes it's there ok good so since I've already presented you so you can just take the floor and I will be moving on your behalf thank you thank you chair I'd like to introduce Murari from the department of agricultural research I'll be giving just an overview of the status of animal genetic resources and conservation in the Zarek region can you move to the next slide so Zarek has a diversity of the genetic resources in fact it's one of the diverse regions of Africa so this genetic resources provide several papers including have we lost Murari again yeah I think his connection has dropped that is yeah that is a serious problem it's a common problem in many of our countries so let's hope he join again in the meantime maybe we can Musa I don't know if there is any comment on the questions regarding the access and beneficiary or what have been said before we are looking for Murari to join at the moment there are no questions and I think the presentation was a bit comprehensive I guess the the confusion has always been how to move materials between countries and I think that was adequately covered I don't know if anyone has any comments or anything they would like to have but at the moment there is no question in the Q&A or the comment section okay so are you able to see if Murari is back or not I think he is around the problem is actually Murari is not around I thought it was just the sound system he is not here Tom's hand is up Tom do you have something you want to say I've got something provocative to say yes please so ABS access the problem is the real issue that everybody feels about this is that access seems to be the least effective part of this whole thing there is a real concentration on protecting the benefits and my concern is a little bit is that there seem to be quite a lot of countries in the world that are not signed up to Nagoya is that the case I would say that some of the big ones in the USA as far as I understand does not sign up yeah I'm not sure whether China does do they sign up yes China has a system has a system that doesn't signed up to Nagoya not so sure so in South America Brazil for example they signed up yes okay so the problem is that science moves on and while people are pushing bits of paper around a lot of the ideas and experiments become redundant because they basically get done elsewhere and I think what really is very very important is that ABS or Nagoya what you want to call it has to be efficient and quick because science doesn't sit still and I think the benefits will be lost if there's no if it's not made an efficient and effective procedure because essentially things become redundant once other countries have done them so I think it's really I think it clearly Nagoya has got very good ideas behind it but unless the implementation is done swiftly then researchers get tired and eventually we'll just not do the experiments they have to look for something because we live in short term grants yes so we cannot wait for things so I think it's really really important that this procedure becomes a matter of months but it can take years and it is a source of frustration for many people who are we have good idea we want to improve the welfare of people across the world we want to do the experiments because we think there's some benefit but if we can't get access quick access to samples and things then those experiments are completely worthless absolutely so my experience is that it doesn't absolutely that's alright Tom I think the challenge is always the balance between speed and compliance but as you pointed out in the list of your countries that haven't signed up to the Nagoya you might quickly realize they have nothing to be exploited or they have but I think your point is valid the challenge has always been I think most of this have been developed most of the time is very quickly and with no thought on how to they are going to be implemented but I think with the time it's getting better and better yeah no I'm sure it's just it can only improve going forward but yeah your point is valid as in you know you don't want people you don't want to stop people from but there was also the other point is I think if you think of the genesis of things that made the Nagoya protocol necessary it was the idea that someone could just fly in have some people collect some DNA for them then it disappears and you never hear about it yeah unless you can access some journal where you see that DNA collected was used in some study sure and you are not even cited in that study so like it wasn't necessary and even sometimes when there was an attempt to actually acknowledge the source of it it was mainly a technical source there was actually nothing to do with the intellectual input and then you know just like your stem cells if I took your stem cells and used them for something and never acknowledge that you generated them you will be pretty paced yeah but I understand but actually in reality is that I guess you're right I mean legal people would definitely hold on to that but I mean I have to say that most people's you know in science usually what happens is you share it out you get a couple of acknowledgements but once it's out there in the academic environment things move fast because people have access the protective nature of Nagoya and ABS is that those things down so much that people outside it are just racing ahead and you know that really just become and in the meantime some of the resources are disappearing you know I mean it's not a joke that environments are actually just disappearing the animals that we were interested in you know saving have got nowhere to live yeah so I do understand I mean the sort of imperialistic model of going places and sort of harvesting stuff it is a painful one and I think that's wrong but on the other hand if one makes it overly officious and overly complex then it can just people just go elsewhere yeah I guess it is not something we can find an answer to but now but I think it's what it's yeah I think most of the times it just try to understand reasons behind some of these things but actually it is much more nuanced and complex than that but I guess you also have to think about it that that is the only resource those countries have the other people have the money and the technology and everything and so it needs to they decide okay you have the technology you have the money we have the resources how about we make it a better trade where we all benefit rather than absolutely absolutely I agree completely just take what you want and leave us alone but no sure sure anyway I don't know if the others the speaker is back or they're still lost otherwise we might have just to move on Christian yes I think we can having back yeah we just have to move on yeah and only what nice for me to thank everybody who has been here we took time to attend and to exchange on this and for our friend from Southern Africa that is just the beginning of the journey and as Tom was mentioning there will be no benefit if there is no access to genetic resources so working all together it's to support that we have we comply of course that scientists have access to genetic resources to produce the materials the good that will be used to improve livelihood and sometimes even to tell communities what they really have was the usefulness was the richness of the genetic material that we have so we'll be head with the reaching out the partners in the regions the presenters here and the participants and some other partners in region to see how we can be planning for the web lab training on the promote themselves or the to report themselves as well and to make sure that we have effective conservation of the ground and this is to support the work that Tom is doing on mammals for conservation to support what Moussa is doing on using the stem cells for to explore the diversity and to harness the potential of using that to improve livelihood and what so many other scientists in the regions national partners in the advanced research institutions may be needing to ensure that we have that benefit coming to the communities, local communities, populations and to science, global science community as well so I will just return to you Moussa to say the last word and to close the webinar so thank you everyone