On Tuesday, November 5, Dominic Olver, graduate in biology and philosophy and a master’s student at the University of Saskatchewan (Canada), will present, in a new session of the “café con Sal” lecture series, the talk “Cell Damage and Minimization: Modelling to the Rescue!”, in which he will demonstrate the usefulness and power of combining mathematics with biology to solve seemingly impossible problems.
Dominic Olver, in collaboration with Pablo Heres and Estefania Paredes (ECIMAT, CIM-UVigo) and James Benson (University of Saskatchewan), aims to determine, during his stay at ECIMAT, an optimized protocol for cryopreserving eggs of the common sea urchin Paracentrotus lividus. As presented in previous lectures, cryobiology offers immense benefits in conservation, aquaculture, and agriculture. Cryopreservation involves the complete halt of metabolic activity by lowering the temperature (usually maintained at -196 °C) with the possibility of recovery. Cryopreserved organisms can be maintained indefinitely, allowing for species storage and the potential to increase the effective size of endangered populations. This powerful tool can also be used to culture organisms and enhance the genetic diversity of a stock over time. Currently, no successful protocols are known for sea urchin eggs. With the help of ECIMAT’s functional marine organism preservation service and James Benson, Dominic is building a cost-function model to find the optimal cryopreservation protocol.
During his lecture, Dominic will provide an introduction to the usefulness of the model developed at ECIMAT, presenting preliminary data and demonstrating the power of combining mathematics and biology to solve potentially impossible problems.
The conference will take place at 11.00h in the ECIMAT auditorium after a coffee and will be broadcast live at http://tv.uvigo.es/es/directo/1.html, and will later be available on UVigoTV and on our website.
