Cancelled: Colloquium with Eske Willerslev (Director of CAEG at the University of Copenhagen, DK)

THE COLLOQUIUM WILL BE RESCHEDULED IN 2026!

On 25 November we will welcome Eske Willerslev as a speaker at the SNP2Prot Colloquium Series. In Copenhagen, he leads the Centre of excellence in Ancient Environmental Genomics (CAEG) and the Ancient Environmental Genomics Initiative for Sustainability (AEGIS). He is a professor at both the University of Copenhagen and University of Cambridge. In addition, he is Excellence Professor at Bremen University, Germany.

Speaker: Eske Willerslev (Director of CAEG at the University of Copenhagen, DK)
Title: The AEGIS project

Date: Tuesday, 25 November 2025
Time: 5 pm
Location: Lecture hall E.02, Theodor-Lieser-Strasse 9 (Heide Süd Campus), 06120 Halle (Saale)

Abstract: The Ancient Environmental Genomics Initiative for Sustainability (AEGIS)

Climate change poses a critical threat to human food security, and its impacts are forecast by the IPCC to affect agricultural production across much of the globe, putting a significant proportion of the world’s population at risk of food insecurity, if not starvation.
Although modern agricultural practices have built cropping systems that maximise yields in today’s climate, these typically lack genetic and organismal diversity, require intensive use of chemical fertilisers, pesticides, and heavy irrigation, and have limited resilience to rapid climatic and environmental change. Attempts to meet the coming challenges of food insecurity and ensuring agricultural sustainability are further constrained by the genetically depleted staple crops, the slow processes of conventional breeding and our poor understanding of organismal interactions and adaptations in both natural and agro-ecosystems. Yet each unique climate cycle, coupled with human cultivation and plant domestication (starting ~12,000 years ago), produced novel genetic and organismal configurations, specific for all types of environments, but not seen since. This has resulted in an almost – infinite number of past species adaptations and ecosystem responses to climate changes in a wide range of natural and human-modified settings. The great majority of the genetic information underpinning these adaptive responses has been lost through evolutionary change. However, a rich record of those responses survives in the earth over many thousands and millions of years as ancient environmental DNA (eDNA).

A single gram of sediment contains billions of DNA fragments and other ancient biomolecules, providing a comprehensive record of the organisms that inhabited the local environment, including fungi, bacteria, viruses, wild and domesticated plants and animals – even in the complete absence of living organisms or fossil remains. Following analytical developments in eDNA over the last two decades – and concurrent rapid advances in the ability to technically modify crops and their ecosystems – it is in principle feasible to tap into this vast eDNA archive at scale to reliably retrieve genetic and organismal information from the past and use nature’s own solutions to climate change (across time and environments) as a means for improving future food sustainability.

This presentation is an introduction to a newly started large-scale project termed Ancient Environmental Genomics Initiative for Sustainability (AEGIS). The vision behind AEGIS is to build a more sustainable and secure food production system while also preserving biodiversity in cropping systems under climate change. To meet its vision, the 18 institutions behind AEGIS will develop the essential science and methodology to use ancient eDNA – alongside other ancient and modern biomolecule-based approaches – to identify important organismal associations and genetic adaptations in natural and agro-ecosystems that will improve future food security under climate change.

If you like to meet with the speaker, please contact the host, Alain Tissier.

See all upcoming SNP2Prot colloquia listed here: https://snp2prot.uni-halle.de/events/category/colloquium/

The SNP2Prot Colloquium Series is integrated to the

• Halle Plant Science Colloquium (HPSC) – https://www.landw.uni-halle.de/prof/pflanzenernaehrung/hpsc/
• IPB Seminar Series – https://www.ipb-halle.de/forschung/symposien-und-kolloquien/vortraege/ipb-seminare