by Andrei Ștefan
The 2nd edition of the RoBioinfo Conference took place between 11-13 April 2024 in the lovely city of Cluj-Napoca, Romania. This event was organized by the Romanian Society of Bioinformatics and I was invited to give a talk about ERGA, as country representative in the ERGA Council. The conference mainly focused on clinical genomics and human health, but had a parallel session dedicated to ancient DNA and animal genomics. Roughly 100 people took part in the conference and the preceding workshops.
The first part of the talk was about ERGA structure and organization and the second part focused on the sample workflow of the pilot-project, with an emphasis on the results. One of the species included in the pilot is Nepa anophthalma (a blind, hunting insect from Movile Cave) and the attendees were curious to find out more about it and its environment. The audience mostly comprised students and young researchers and were happy to hear that people in Romania are also conducting studies in biodiversity genomics. The following discussions were about obtaining sampling and shipping permits and the challenges of polyploidy in plant genomics.Â
The conference presented a great opportunity to talk about ERGA and the results of the pilot-project and hopefully drive some students in the field of conservation genomics. I wish to thank LuÃsa and Chiara from the ERGA Media and Communications Committee for their help in setting up the presentation.
Andrei Ștefan part of the ERGA Council representing Romania. He works in the molecular biology lab of the Natural History Museum in Bucharest.
🇷🇴 Would you like to connect with other researchers working on biodiversity genomics in Romania? Write to the country representatives in the ERGA Council: Romania@erga-biodiversity.eu