 Hello, and welcome to the Louise Slaughter National DNA Day Lecture. Today is our annual Louise M. Slaughter National DNA Day Lecture. This lecture is named after Congresswoman Louise M. Slaughter. In 2003, she led a group of legislators who passed a concurrent resolution creating National DNA Day to celebrate the completion of the Human Genome Project and the 50th anniversary of the discovery of DNA's double helix structure. Sadly, Representative Slaughter passed away in 2018 after a barrier breaking career dedicated to science and public service. She was one of the earliest champions of genomics on Capitol Hill and a stead best steadfast advocate for policies that have allowed for genomics research to advance to the point where we are today. It is also thanks to Miss Slaughter that we now have a law called the Genomic Information Nondiscrimination Act, or GINA, which prohibits genetic discrimination and whose protections allow patients and research participants to undergo genetic and genomic testing without fear that their results will be used to negatively impact their job or access to health insurance. Now, allow me to introduce Dr. Eric Green, NHGRI director. He will be presenting our featured speaker today. Thank you, Christina, and it's absolutely my pleasure to introduce Dr. Rebecca Johnson as this year's Louise and Slaughter lecture. Now, by way of background, Dr. Johnson is the recently appointed chief scientist and associate director for science at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, where she's responsible for overall scientific leadership and administration of the museum's research and collections activities. She's also a wildlife forensic scientist, a conservation geneticist and chief investigator of the Kuala Genome Consortium, a role through which she has significantly advanced scientific knowledge and contributed to management recommendations for the iconic Australian species. Prior to joining the Smithsonian, Dr. Johnson held the role as chief scientist of the Australian Museum, actually the first female to do so in more than its 190-year history. Dr. Johnson has a bachelor of science with honors from the University of Sydney and a PhD from La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. She's a graduate of the Indian leading for results program and spent four months at Kyoto University in 2019 as a visiting professor. Dr. Johnson has been recognized for her work through several awards, most recently in 2020. She became a member of the Order of Australia for, quote, significant service to wildlife forensic science and to young women scientists. Dr. Johnson is passionate about promoting wildlife innovation, reducing the illegal wildlife trade and advocating for the importance of STEM, particularly women in STEM, in early and lifelong education. In her presentation today entitled The Wildlife Detective, a DNA-driven journey of Kuala's cockatoos and wildlife forensics, Dr. Johnson will share her DNA-driven science journey, which includes establishing the first accredited wildlife forensic laboratory in the southern hemisphere and working on conservation genomics of some of Australia's most iconic wildlife species. So we're delighted that she's here to join us today. We're also delighted that she now lives in the Washington, D.C. area and will have a prominent Smithsonian, an organization that NHGRI has a wonderful history of partnership collaborations and good friendships with, and we are really looking forward to working with her closely in the coming years on many areas of mutual interest, some of which you'll be talking about today. So before I turn it over to Dr. Johnson, let me just say for those who are watching, if you have questions, please just type your questions in the Q&A box that's available to you. And then at the end of her talk, I'm going to be moderating that Q&A and I'll be drawing from some of the questions that you submit. So I will now turn the Zoom platform over to Dr. Johnson. Thank you for joining us. Thank you, Dr. Green. And hello, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today to celebrate the wonders of DNA, particularly from the Southern Hemisphere. I thought that I would start my presentation today to sharing with you how I kind of became an accidental wildlife forensic scientist. And for those of you that perhaps are thinking about a career in science or wondering where your career in science might take you, I hope this is a lesson that it might be able to go anywhere if you think about what your skills are and what the possibilities might be. And this journey for me, which quite closely links to me being here now in Washington DC, started way back in 2004 when I had just started work at the Australian Museum. I was in a fairly junior position as the DNA laboratory manager there. And I got a phone call from the New South Wales police who are the police force in that state. And they asked me if I would help them to identify a blood sample that they had taken from a ledge crime. The story was that in a park not far from Sydney, there was every single day this flock of self-accrested cockatoos, these big iconic birds that are very common in many parts of Australia. They would come every day to this park. The local families would come down and feed them. And on this particular day, a vehicle drove into the park across the park and seemed to intentionally run over the entire flock while they were feeding. Unfortunately, over 20 birds were either injured or killed as part of that event. And all of them had to be euthanized. And so people were very upset. The car had a license plate, which was reported to the police, which led them to the person's house where it was registered who denied any involvement in this event. The police did decide to take a look at that vehicle and found this blood sample, which led to the phone conversation with myself. Of course, I don't need to tell you that looking at a blood sample, you can't tell if it's a cockatoo. You can't tell if it's something you might have run over on the road or even perhaps it came from a human through some kind of accident. So I thought about it and they were asking me because this is not the kind of thing that the forensic groups in Australia would deal with, that they're flat out dealing with human samples. So I thought, as a geneticist, I could certainly help with this identification. Working at the Australian Museum, I had plenty of access to cockatoos that I would want to use as reference sample. So I went ahead and said, sure, I'll give it a go. And of course, it was a cockatoo, which is why I'm telling you this story. And I look back on that now and I wonder if that was actually the beginning of forensic science in a coordinated way in Australia. So you'll remember that the person that was involved originally said that they were not part of it. It did eventually go to court. He did plead guilty to aggravated cruelty to negligent driving and not having a license in the first place. After this case was kind of being sentenced, it also turned out that he didn't have a license because he had already been involved in a manslaughter situation where he had killed a person with his car. So while this was quite confronting and not the kind of thing that you think about dealing with when you're going through your studies and becoming a scientist, it really was a great example of how you can combine skills like genetics and the kind of resource and science that we do at museums to really make a difference in an unexpected way. So 16-plus years on, this is just a tiny snapshot of the kind of cases that we have worked on in wildlife, what is called wildlife forensics. So investigating samples that have been seized because there's some kind of link to either wildlife crime or suspicion that it might be something that is protected. So it can be everything from identifying what species of shark this might be to what I started work with the aviation industry in Australia, which is helping them to identify the species of birds and also bats that might strike aircraft so that they can help manage them to things like identifying... But from looking at this specimen here, you can see it's probably a parrot. But what species is it? So the thing that unifies everything on this screen is the need for DNA to interrogate it so that we can help answer questions in the legal system. So if I add my own journey to this journey, I guess today is somewhat about how the very small child from the local public school in Sydney, who really was a huge fan of science, ended up here in Washington, D.C. and I think I can credit DNA with a huge amount of that journey. And of course, not discounting that through quite a lot of my schooling, I thought I would like to be a professional ballerina before I realised that I would probably do much better with trying to save the world in the sciences. And I've got to do some pretty cool things along the way, which I feel incredibly fortunate about. So I thought I would break today's presentation into three from parts and from cockatoos to koalas. Firstly, I thought I would give a little bit more background on how valuable science and particularly DNA and genomics can be in the fighting crime kind of wildlife forensics area, how valuable genomics and DNA is as a tool and a key in conservation and very relevant to the fact that this lecture is named after an elected member of Congress. How important it is that our science actually connects with the people that make decisions. So firstly, I will touch on wildlife crime and how DNA can be really valuable as a tool for helping wildlife crime combined with museum collections and the kind of expertise that we have in museums. So just to give you a bit of context, while my original story was an idiot who ran over a lot of cockatoos and that was pretty awful. If taken at the grandest scale, wildlife crime is a global thing. It is worth billions of dollars per year. And you can see here, unlike a lot of things in our economy, it's unfortunately seems to be growing at two to three times the rate of the annual economy. And it is truly global and it is at a massive scale. So it can involve things like illegal logging, illegal fishing, you can see here and trade in protected species. So it covers an incredibly broad range. And of course, if we're going to work with people that prosecute, investigate this kind of crime, one of the most valuable things that we can assist with as scientists is to provide them robust usable data that applies into the legal system as much as possible. So the first story or the first example I wanted to share with you was a DNA-based toolkit that we developed for species identification of rhino horns. You may know that rhino horns are unfortunately heavily targeted by traffickers for their horn because it's worth an enormous amount of money. Unfortunately, it's worth more than gold by weight. And I've made this image intentionally small because it's very confronting. But unfortunately, this is the reality of the illegal rhino horn trade. As much horn as possible is typically taken from these animals when they're killed because every ounce is worth money. And this is just an example of some of the casework that we've worked on the rest of the screen here. Just to orient you to the kind of species that are involved here, there are five species of rhinoceros. Two of them are from Africa, the two on the left-hand side. And there's actually three in Asia. And you can see the number under each one of these species here. And even the white rhinoceros, which has estimated about 20,000 individuals, that's still a pretty low number for a wild animal that we want to be sustaining as much as possible, particularly when, unfortunately, they are being poached at a rate that seems to outstrip their rate of reproduction. So there's five different species. And when you get to the horn, it's actually very difficult to tell what species it is. And this, of course, is very important if you're trying to prosecute based on where it might have come from, or also get some intelligence as to what species are being targeted by poachers. So this is some work that one of my students, Carl Yewett, did as part of his honours. What he did was using DNA and using rhino samples from museum collections. Obviously, going out and sampling a rhino would require a lot of permissions. So we use museum collections a lot for developing these kind of reference databases. He basically found the smallest and most distinguishable piece of DNA that he could, that would reliably distinguish between the five different species of rhino. He also included horse, which is an out group, but also because horse is commonly seen as a substitute in the illegal trade. When you're dealing with illicit substances, substitution is rife. Ethics do not need apply. So what Carl did was he developed a test that was fit for purpose. Rhino horn is a very degraded template to work with. It's effectively fingernails or highly compressed hair. So it's like a keratin. So the DNA amount in that material is quite low. So he needed to develop something that was going to be suitable for that. This is also something that we want to share with our colleagues across the world, particularly in the Southeast Asian region as much as possible because they unfortunately see a lot of rhino horn in the trade. So we wanted to share with them this protocol and cross validate so that we knew that it worked not just in our hands, but in other laboratories, perhaps laboratories that had more basic equipment than ours or perhaps laboratories that were more fancy than ours. It's also really important when you're wanting to apply something in the forensic world to ensure that you understand the limits of detection and that it's going to work under the conditions that you publish. And there was so much demand for this test that it was used in casework countries before it was even published, which was kind of surprising, kind of reassuring, but also a bit depressing because there was a real need for it. Getting back to the samples that I showed you on the first slide were introducing the rhino horn. These are all identified using this test. You can see that the three identifications here are from three different species that were on that original slide, two of them with very, very low population numbers. And you'll also remember that product substitution is common in this kind of world. And water buffalo is something we do see a lot. And this statue, this carved statue, which I understand cost a lot of money, tens of thousands of dollars, turned out to be a lot of horse hooves joined together. Moving on now to something that might be a little less familiar, which is a DNA toolkit to track the source of a kidneys in the illegal wildlife trade. So these are, you might firstly wonder, what seriously are kidneys in the illegal wildlife trade? These are just to remind you, they're one of the five species of egg-laying mammals or monotremes. And these are very endemic to Australia and a couple of surrounding countries. So it was really surprising for us to start hearing that these were being offered for sale at the rate of up to 150 animals per year through these companies that like to sell animals to zoos and other collecting institutions. And so to put that in context, in Australian zoos, only 30 puggles or baby echidnas had been born within the last 10 years. So the equation just did not fit that 150 of these supposedly captive bred animals were being sold. And so we thought this might be worth investigating because we actually worked with several zoos who really, really want to make sure that they were sourcing their animals from ethical and legal sources. So the concern when you see this kind of equation is that the kidneys are being put up for sale as captive bred, which does have a different set of laws. And in fact, they're being illegally taken from the wild and given counterfeit paperwork. So this is work that one of my students, Alex, did and she went ahead and developed a DNA-based method for determining the source location of the short beaked echidna. So just to quickly orient you to the map here, the dots on the Australia writ large in black, those are the samples from Australia. And then you can also see just north of there in Papua New Guinea, in the Torres Strait and in Indonesia, there's also echidnas. So this is one of the most basic things that we're often asked in the illegal wildlife trade, what is the country of origin or what is the source of origin? Because that firstly gives intelligence as to where it's coming from and secondly, it gives information as to what species it is or what location it is in terms of applying some of the legislations that might be applicable depending on the crime. So what Alex did was to develop a test that was suitable for, again, this kind of low-template sample and she, in this case, used a quill. So the echidnas are typically covered, their entire back is covered with quills and she tried to use samples that were as non-invasive as possible. So ideally, they could even be shed. This is extra good because perhaps a wildlife inspector could take a sample as opposed to waiting for a zoo if we're in the case of needing to understand where an animal has come from. She was able to, again, very similar to the rhino test, find a very small piece of DNA that was able to be extracted from these low-template samples and it was able to definitively assign whether or not it had come from Australia or one of the places north of Australia. So that's the first kind of step that is a basic requirement and valuable in most wildlife crime questions. The second thing she did using markers from across the echidna genome was to develop markers that could actually assign parentage. And she was very lucky to work with a person who had done a lot of work with a particular population so they knew exactly who was related to who and she was able to validate the possibility of applying parentage in using those markers. So interestingly, I mentioned that we kind of heard a lot about this and there was talk that there were lots of samples around. It's ready to be deployed for use but there has not actually been a casework example yet. And while this is a cartoon that came out in one of the Sydney newspapers when the paper was published, this is not typically how echidnas are trafficked, although it is how a lot of other animals are trafficked. This, we have seen other examples where learning that a test is available or hearing that testing is going to be implemented actually leads to a drop-off of the activity in that particular species. So I'm not sure if that's actually happened in this case, but it is actually a good thing that we have this test and we have not yet needed to use it. So moving on to the second part, which is I guess more around the conservation use of DNA and genomics. And again, the really important dimension that museums and museum collections play I've chosen a couple of species to highlight this kind of work for today's presentation. Before I do that, I just want to again, give you a bit of background from where we come from in Australia. The image on the screen here is unfortunately one of our icons of extinction. These are the Tasmanian tiger or the phylocene and the last animal went extinct before our eyes in a zoo in Tasmania on the 7th of September in 1936. So it's kind of shameful and it's a bit of a reminder that you can't just sit by and watch that intervention needs to happen well before you're looking at the last animal. To kind of add to that, Australia was settled by Europeans in 1788. And unfortunately, we have the worst mammal extinction rate of any country. We've lost over 10% of our terrestrial mammals during that time in only a couple of hundred years. And in 2019, it was estimated that a hundred species had gone extinct just since that time. That's very likely to be an underestimate because the kind of information is based on things that tend to be kind of charismatic like the phylocene and visible and more likely to be studied. So unfortunately, it could well be an underestimate. So this is why we think about this a lot in Australia. And this is not unique to Australia, but this is our uncomfortable reality. We have increasing urban development. We have increasing land clearing for development, for roads, for agriculture. And Australia having one of the most extreme climates in the world, we are very much at the pointy end of the impacts of climate change. One or one and a half degrees increase in Australia could really, really push some of these species that already live in quite extreme environments to the brink. So these are the things that we think about a lot and how do we mitigate them and how do we use science to mitigate them as best as possible. So I thought I'd share with you something that you may or may not be familiar with. It's another type of cockatoo related, but obviously different to my original cockatoo that I worked with. This is the red-tailed black cockatoo. It's an incredibly widespread species across Australia. It inhabits everything from the savannas to the deserts, temperate forests, woodlands. And again, probably familiar story. Its populations in some areas are dwindling due to increased clearing of the woodland, which is really important to them. You can see the photo down the right-hand side of the screen here. They rely on hollows to nest and sometimes these trees can be 200 years old. So clearing those trees or those trees dying because of the increased stress to them through changes in climate are also really decimating some pockets of this population. These are also, they're incredibly popular beloved birds in Australia. So there have been quite a lot of collection collecting and there are quite a lot of museum collections that can be drawn upon to look at what they look like in the past and help us learn how we can conserve them in the future. So this was work that was done by Kyle who you will remember from the rhino horn test as part of his PhD where he looked, he used genomic techniques to look at a range of bird species either for conservation or even for understanding invasion. So just to remind you this, so I said it was widespread. This is how widespread the five different subspecies species are across Australia. They cover every part of the country. And again, just to kind of give you a comparison you could almost overlay the United States onto Australia. It's a little bit bigger, but we're talking about a pretty similar land mass. So this is a very big area for this bird to be across. And again, all parrots are protected. So this is not the kind of thing that you go out lightly and collect. So we did draw upon specimens that were up to 100 years old to animals that had been collected via roadkill to try and do a full country-wide assessment of the genetics of this species or actually the five different subspecies. And so thanks to genomics, we actually discovered a few things. Firstly, that this enormous area up here with what are described as two subspecies could almost be described as one, which is interesting, that it's perhaps a little counter-intuitive that you could manage that much of an area as a single entity. In contrast, this one here over in Western Australia, which was previously thought to be part of this big distribution right across the middle, was actually very, very distinct. Distinct enough that we decided to call it a new subspecies, which is something that we don't take lightly. It looks exactly the same as all of these other ones that it had been lumped with, but genetically it was quite distinct. By calling it a new subspecies and we called it colipterincus banksia escondidus and escondidus means hidden, it does potentially give it different conservation status and can be looked at in a different way for management. So suddenly it's just this population you're dealing with as opposed to drawing upon this entire group. And unfortunately, another one of the subspecies right down the bottom of the country here, which spans part of South Australia and Victoria. This one, we know that this one is the most at risk. It is, unfortunately, there's probably 1,000 individuals left. There's a huge amount of attention on this population because it's unfortunately subject to poaching. It's also subject to the impacts of land clearing and loss of habitat. And we did find that this population does seem to have a very high level of inbreeding. And so we recommended that this be used in some kind of genetic rescue possibility as they go forward and if they do end up down the captive breeding route. This is also a really interesting example of really, really intensive and committed community science. And this is a really great website to go and have a look at where there's everything you need to know about the red-tailed black cockatoo and this population and there's a very regular count of these birds. So they practically know every bird. So this is, while not the greatest result, also as much information as possible is useful when we're talking about conserving something that's not just amazing iconic species but also a really important member of the ecosystem. So everything that I've mentioned to date has either relied on little tiny pieces of DNA that can help us answer a question like wildlife crime or wildlife trafficking or have swept across the genome to give us an indication of can we tell which kidneys relate to this one or can we look at how related these cockatoos are to each other or do we have separate subspecies? The final part of my presentation is using full on genomics to understand whether or not this is gonna be helpful for conservation and what else can it tell us about a very iconic species which is the koala. So I thought I'd first share with you a little bit of background about the koala. When throughout the project, which started in 2012 we did joke that we would be looking for the cute gene that that would be, wouldn't that be fun to find because the koalas are certainly not short on the cute. They also have some really interesting biological nuances or biological specialties. They're firstly, you can see over here this tiny little baby. They're born at 35 days about the size of a jelly bean and then they go into the pouch as a marsupial and they spend about six months where they get a really complex diet of milk, different proteins, different times of the development until finally they emerge after about six months. And then they start eating this diet which is so full of plant secondary metabolites or what we would find it so toxic at the level that they eat it that we would die. And so they're one of the very few animals that has been able to specialize to eat something that is not just unpalatable to most other species but is deadly in some cases. Of course, they're also looking for the cute gene. You may remember the bushfires in Australia in 2019 and early 2020. They really did become the face of the biodiversity that was being lost. Thousands and millions and millions of animals were lost in those fires and koalas were very much the face of that. There was also a lot of human loss during those fires. So they're very iconic in many ways but they're also very interesting biologically. Unfortunately, there's all evidence suggests that they're rapidly declining in the wild. A paper that was published in 2016 suggests that at best there might be 600,000 koalas remaining at worst maybe 100,000 so that the middle is maybe 300 and over the next 15 years we're looking at a decline of up to 53% in some areas of its range. Again, you've seen a few maps of Australia today but the blue, the lighter blue is the current distribution of koalas. So you can see they're really narrowly distributed even though there's a massive land mass because they are very niche that they're very, very tired to the fauna that they feed on and they sleep in. And thousands and millions of years ago there were actually koalas across the other side of Australia but they were not the same species as the modern koala that we have today which is just a single species. So unfortunately this is happening not just because of natural processes of the climate changing over time but it is being accelerated by extreme land clearing by urbanization. Most Australians live right along the coast here. So there is a real tension between who gets to live in that habitat. They do unfortunately suffer from chlamydia in their eyes and also in their urogenital tract. This if it's untreated leaves them blind and sterile. So the disease can be a real problem for koalas and also just to add extra threats. When koalas were discovered by Europeans in the late 1800s, early 1900s they hunted them for their skins. And so millions of animals were taken out of the population for through hunting. So talk about death by a thousand cuts and this unfortunately has not abated. So this was a real driver for the koala genome project to understand how we could insert science into something that we really didn't wanna end up as an emergency situation. And what we were able to do was produce three high quality genomes. The first one came from this animal here. Her name was Pacific chocolate and she was at the Port Macquarie Koala Hospital so just north of Sydney. And she unfortunately had a really severe chlamydia infection that did not respond to treatment. So the decision was made to euthanize her and we were able to take samples as many samples as we possibly could to conduct this work because we did really need high quality samples. So I guess the big question is how did a high quality genome facilitate discovery and conservation for this species? We were very lucky that we were able to get a really three really high quality genomes including a long read genome which is very important to give you insight into how things are rearranged in the genome. So I mentioned the koala and their extremely picky diet. You can see this girl here. She's looking around. She's been extremely intentional if a koala can be intentional about what leaf she's eating. She's not just picking the leaf that's closest to her. So koalas have this amazing ability to detect leaves and only eat leaves that have above 50% water content. And while I wouldn't say that we demonstrated a direct link, we did find a gene, the aquaporin 5 gene that appears to be duplicated in koalas and both copies seem to be expressed in this library gland. Aquaporin 5, the function is kind of unknown but it is associated with an ability to sense water in some other organisms. We also found that koalas have a huge number of bitter taste receptors. And you remember, I tend to put kind of toxic in inverted commas because they do eat a diet that is toxic but obviously it's not toxic to them. However, they do wanna minimize the amount of plant secondary metabolites that are being ingested. So we suspect that the bitter taste receptors, again, all of which seem to be functional, probably help them discriminate between the less toxic trees and the more palatable trees to them. I also, in terms of how they actually process this, there's higher levels of plant secondary metabolites which they do, they do. We looked at some very obvious candidates to look at where the cytochrome P450 family of metabolic enzymes of which we all have every eukaryote, every multicellular organism has them because they help us process toxins in our environment. So having a look at these in koalas and this is just, this is the most interesting one that we found which is the cytochrome P4502 subsam family C. You can see, this is a comparison between koalas which are in green here and all of the other vertebrate genomes we could get our hands on that also had genes that we could compare them to. So you can see humans in here, dogs in here and really the thing to point out is that while most species have one or two copies, koala have these two enormous expansions relative to other species that we looked at. You remember that we were able to take samples from Pacific chocolate. We also took as many organs as possible so that we were able to check whether or not certain genes were expressed. In this particular case, they were also expressed in her live. All of these were expressed in her liver. So what we think probably has happened and it is that these have been tendably duplicated over time and have slightly diverged in their function. So that koalas are effectively turned into these super detoxing organisms where they're just parallel processing these toxins so they can get through them as quick as possible. There are some implications as far as veterinary care go as well because this is the same metabolic pathway that some medications use. So if you were giving it koala pain relief, you would be avoiding medications that use those pathways because they would metabolize them before it was even worth giving it to them. The final bit that I want to kind of highlight which again is really important is how the genome reveals the unseen and how important this is for conservation. Again, so this is an example of some of the population that we started as part of the genomic work. And I just want to point out a couple of bits on this map here. Here where the black circle is, is what we found a really interconnected population. It's very diverse, so really important to preserve but also it shows a lot of exchange across that region. It also cuts between two states in Australia and it is our instinct unfortunately as humans to manage things by lines that we draw on a map. But this showed very clearly that koalas move across this particular region and we should treat them as such because if we artificially cut them by state or if we continue to chop up their population so they can't move across the landscape, we are potentially putting them more at risk by pushing them into little pockets. The other thing I want to point out here is the koalas down in the south of the country. So there's actually a lot of koalas down here but unfortunately if you look over here, inbreeding higher is not better. Unfortunately, they're an incredibly inbred population and so while they're very abundant and that they might look good, as far as diversity go, they are very low. So this is not a great practice to perpetuate and there's a lot of discussion about how this might be handled going forward. And so I guess all of the cool science that we do is wonderful and great and super fulfilling. It's extra fulfilling if you're able to get traction with people that maybe are not scientists and are in a position to make decisions. And this is what we were able to do with the koala genome work where we were approached to be part of an expert panel where the science and genomic information was actually integrated into the plan to conserve koalas. So this is me over here as a weird awkward science expert with the Premier of New South Wales and the Environment Minister at the time launching this plan and talking about why it was really important to integrate science into this work. Something that's happened very recently and something that you don't see very often is actually two environment ministers, a state and a federal environment minister who have jointly combined to fund hundreds of additional koala genomes to be sequenced for exactly this purpose to understand what their population looks like, to understand whether or not there are some really key adaptive parts of the genome that are going to be really important to preserve as the climate changes or as the landscape changes. So this is really exciting to see additional commitments into generating these data and using them for management. And this really is relevant to this lecture today, I think. We heard earlier that the commitment from representatives slaughter to science and science-based decisions and her work in introducing the legislation that prevented discrimination against genetic data really is in the spirit of how we're trying to try to operate as scientists where we really embrace open data because the more we can share and the more we can use from the community, the more we can learn and all benefit everyone. So I think it's a really apt link. And of course, the final message is that science really can take you anywhere. And for me, it's an extraordinary opportunity now to lead science at the largest natural history museum in the world, with the largest collection in the world and an extraordinary array of experts who apply this kind of technology in their daily lives. It's also really special to me that we have a bird strike program and natural history which was one of the original inspirations for me in Australia to start a program just like that in Australia. So I think the ability of museums to contribute to this landscape and things that make the world better is very infinite, but also perhaps a little sometimes surprising. And of course, Eric mentioned earlier in his introduction, we have collaborated with NHGRI on communicating this to the public, which is again, so, so key. All of the great science in the world is so much greater if we can actually communicate it to people that don't encounter it in their daily lives. So we're working really hard at natural history to develop our genomics environment so that we are really specializing in the things that help us to extract all of that valuable information from our museum collections so that we can be really good collaborators and really good contributors to the knowledge of biodiversity in the country. I'm going to thank you all very much for listening and coming along today. And I'd first like to acknowledge the many, many people that have contributed to the work that I've presented to you today. And I'm very happy to take questions if we have questions. So thank you. Well, thank you, Rebecca. That was terrific. And I'm sure the people watching live and will watch off videotapes of this will really enjoy learning some of these things that you were telling us about and parts of the world that maybe many people are not quite as familiar with. There are some questions and then I have some of my own and maybe we'll see if more come in. One of the first questions that came in was brought up when you were talking about some of the bird species. But I actually think the same kind of question might apply even for the koalas. Like when you show Australia with this massive amount of territory and that you have these very small pockets of habitat where these animals who are under extreme threat exist. And then you even showed, for example, with the koalas but I think the same thing applied even with some of the birds is just that you end up with lack of variation, extensive amounts of inbreeding. Is part of the plan the idea of relocating subpopulations to different parts of Australia or the populations to try to improve on the diversity? Yeah, I've kind of given you two contrasting examples there. So the birds, they're very mobile and that population that I showed you right at the top of Australia, there's clear evidence that they fly massive amounts and there's a lot of gene flow. In captivity, some of those subspecies of birds will breed and that's always something that's very interesting to us because that's an example of if you took away that barrier it might happen. So it gives you an idea of how important that barrier is. So the one at the top of the country, there's no division between the two populations but the one in now in West, the new one, there actually is a barrier that probably needs to be maintained if we wanna keep that bird in its ecosystem. Koalas are the real challenge because you can't just take an animal from the southern part of the country into the northern part of the country. The climate is actually quite different and they show a lot of local adaptation. So they probably won't like eating the food from there. They might not be able to cope with the climate. So with koalas, we tend to recommend a near neighbor approach where you take a koala from close by and make it a more stepwise change. Ideally, we don't get to the stage where we're doing captive breeding but this is exactly the information that we need to do captive breeding if we get there and there's lots of successful examples where that's been done. Yeah, the answer you just gave by the koala actually just related to a question that came in. So you actually answered that question really nicely. A different question. Can you suggest a path of study for someone interested in genomics and wildlife forensic science? Obviously, you had one journey but I'm sure there's many data there but genomics is more advanced. The forensic science field is more recognized. Is there, like in Australia, are there formal programs for this now? There's actually, there's only a couple of formal programs that I know of in the world. There's one in Scotland and I think there's a couple here in the US. And so what I usually suggest is that if you're particularly interested in wildlife forensics then learn the wildlife first. It's much easier to learn how to do a forensic test than to understand how biodiversity is related. And so understanding genome assembly, understanding how to deal with genetic data is so incredibly valuable that you can always learn the forensic work later. And the forensic community tends to, they're very conservative because we're working with samples that may put someone in prison. So we have to make sure that we're very confident that the test is telling us what we think it's telling us. And so in terms of technology, it tends to lag a little bit behind. So I would always say learn the wildlife and learn how does the evolutionary tree work and then work out how the technology might apply to that from a forensic perspective. And the truth is the technology will move so fast that every five years you may be dealing with all new approaches. And of course, one of the approaches that's gonna be key to all of this is the computational side of it. And one of the questions they came in is, are there efforts, and I'm sure there are, but are there uniform efforts or are there consensus efforts to establish sort of global wildlife DNA databases? I mean, especially around forensic applications or are they the same ones that are used for other applications? There are some, I guess I would call them nascent efforts because again, the public genetic database which is incredibly good and so valuable to us in the forensic science as well, which is GenBank, it does not, things have not been submitted to that database with a forensic application in mind. So a lot of them are going to be completely fine. The species identification is gonna be correct. The sequence is going to be correct and not contaminated but you can't indiscriminately use those databases, particularly if you're working on something that might put someone in jail. And so from there, we are working on a database within the forensic community which is also dealing with the idea of what is a species or how does a species relate to how it might be applied in the legal system. And so that's a lot slower process unfortunately and there's a lot of sharing and there's a lot of discussion about what are the data standards? Do you have to see the sample coming out of the animal to validate that it's actually from that species? And so a lot of the museum collections wouldn't fit those criteria, right? So there's a lot of discussion about the chain of custody of how we get the reference, but that cannot stop us actually applying the data that exists in a sensible way. So it's kind of a balance of both. One thing that occurred to me listening to you sort of describe not only the forensic activities such as the horrible cockatoo story at the beginning, but also about some of the things going on with Kuala with various government officials and so on and so forth is for any of this, I'm sure funding can't be simple and straightforward. And so, and I may be what they do in Australia might be different than what they do in other parts of the world, but in general, what supports this work? Is it private? Is it philanthropy? Is it fundraising? Some of it's probably government. It's probably a mix, but are there trends that are changing in recent years, especially as things have gotten cheaper? Yeah, you're right. It's absolutely a mix. And it's easier to get philanthropic funding for something that is charismatic or iconic. And of course, they're not the only species that need attention. So it's usually a combination between research grants, philanthropy, and also partnerships. It's really that we, at Natural History, we would not establish a sequencing center ourselves because there are outstanding sequencing centers like you all in just up the road. So partnerships for technology is really important. And also partnerships for data analysis is probably, if not more important because as you say, it's the way of analyzing data is changing. The storage of data becomes a massive undertaking that perhaps somewhere like Natural History or even Smithsonian haven't really taken into account for our planning. So all of those have relied very heavily on partnerships. And what strike it is you gave the estimates of the illegal wildlife trade. And there must be an immense amount of money put into trying to prevent that trade. That money's coming from somewhere. I'm sure it's constant battle of trying to convince that some of that money should go proactively to the science, which would allow them to leapfrog to give you better tools or give them better tools for being able to track this. And maybe you win the battles one at a time and eventually people will see the value of the genomic technologies and the genomic information. So let me ask, so I'll ask another question came in and I have a question said, how do you, I'm sure this is part of your life mission now. How do you share and communicate the wildlife forensic DNA findings to the general public? I'm sure this is partially related to why you find yourself in your new position. Yeah, one of my, I guess, the thing that we all ask ourselves every time we watch a documentary about conservation or the changing planet or wildlife trafficking, the thing we ask ourselves is what can I do? Is there something that I can do that in my own behaviors? I guess the one thing that I always say, which is maybe not so relevant right now, but when you're on holidays, don't buy some quirky wildlife item. Don't buy a snake in a bottle because it's like snake wine or something because certainly from Australian perspective, it'll get seized when you arrive back in the country. And it could be an endangered species and you've just created a market for that, for the next snake to be caught and put in a bottle. And so I think even at our level, there are things that we can do. Of course, that's the local level and I've just told you that it's a massive global problem and it's really challenging. It is challenging to coordinate across countries. It's challenging to describe something that seems a bit quirky, that a lot of people in the judiciary think it's a bit of a waste of their time to hear about a bird smuggling case. But actually, if you make the link between the highly organized crime, it's just a step to other types of organized crime and it's a very nimble field. So if rhinos kind of disappear, something else will become the latest most profitable species. And so it's not unfortunately, as far as the traffic is going, it's not even the species that are interested in, it's just what is the most profitable at the time. So to make the link between organized crime really clear might get a bit more attention. Going back to the size of the question I missed, someone asked, what sort of differences do you see in doing the genome comparisons across the six groups of koalas that you showed? Do you see major biological differences or just mostly variation that you can tell? It's mainly, at this stage, the level of analysis that we've done, which has not been whole genome for all of those samples, it's been enough to show you could probably geolocate where an animal came from, but you could probably blindly locate them. But it's very clear that the population moves. It's very clear that there's no kind of barrier historically for koalas. We put plenty in place for them with roads and probably the only barriers that we sometimes see are rivers where you can see that a population tends to kind of break where there's a river in between, but not enough that it's completely distinct. So those are the kind of things that we do say to people, if you put a policy makers, if you put a road through here, those koalas have historically moved back and forth, so you need to make sure that they can still do that. And one of your later slides talked about how hundreds of additional genomes are gonna be seen with, I assume you're being extremely strategic in picking which animals from which regions and blah, blah, blah, blah. And that's where it would be, it's super exciting to imagine the prospects of going into detail for the bitter taste receptors by population and detail of understanding the cytochrome P450 enzymes, whether or not they differ between populations and that's the kind of hidden, that's the really key information that's gonna be needed as the climate changes and as species of eucalyptus even become more scarce. So let me end on a more personal note, you give such a compassionate description of your involvement in these iconic species of Australia in case you didn't notice, you just switched hemispheres. You're far away, is your plan to stay involved? Is your plan to both stay involved and also take on other wildlife challenges in the Northern Hemisphere as well? Or I mean, you're obviously in a new venue and a different sort of vantage point. I'm just curious what your plans are, both with continuing with connections of your past but also to build on it and thinking about building a future that you can uniquely do with the Smithsonian. So maybe just tell us a few minutes about what those plans are. Yeah, that's a great question. And luckily for me, all of those things are transferable to the Northern Hemisphere. We have a very active community in the wildlife forensic space here. So I really look forward to working with those colleagues and supporting our bird strike lab at Natural History to continue to do that kind of work. I also, I think I see my job very much as supporting our research environment at Natural History. I won't be leading a research project anytime soon myself. I might be lucky enough to be involved in some of the things like the koala genome re-sequencing, but I see my job really to foster and support the research environment so that our researchers can have a great environment for genomics, have a great environment for informatics and handling big data, and also develop partnerships so that we can allow the extraordinary collection and the extraordinary expertise that we have to impact as much as possible so that we can increase our biodiversity knowledge. Yeah. Well, Rebecca, this was terrific. We really are so grateful that you came and shared some of your experiences and your vision and you have served Louis Slaughter's spirit well and your commitment to education and STEM, and et cetera, et cetera. And most important, as we talked about months ago, we're just waiting for this darn pandemic to end so that we can stop having virtual interactions and start really thinking about ways that the Smithsonian and NHGRI can continue to build interactions and have you now be part of great interactions and collaborations. So thank you for giving this talk today. Happy DNA Day to you and everybody at the Smithsonian. Thanks to everybody who joined us remote or who are going to watch us after the fact. And Rebecca, we'll hopefully see you in person in the very near future. Thank you so much. Happy DNA Day to you too. All right, everyone take care. Have a good weekend. Bye-bye.