Last March 19th, 2024, researcher personnel from the Genomics Area of ITER gave several scientific talks at IES Granadilla in the context of the Cultural Week organized by the educational center. These talks were promoted by the Biology Department and were aimed at students of the fourth year of ESO and first and second year of Bachillerato. The informative talks were given by the researcher and coordinator of the Genomics area of the Institute of Technology and Renewable Energies, José M. Lorenzo-Salazar, who is also a professor of Technology.
Approximately 75 students were able to interact with Professor Lorenzo-Salazar, who showed recent results about the researches that have been carried out from the Genomics Area of ITER to corroborate the origin of the aboriginal population that inhabited the archipelago before the conquest that took place during the XV century. Recent works carried out from the Genomics Area of ITER, a scientific-technological center dependent on the Island Council of Tenerife, from the genome of the contemporary population of the Canary Islands, have also allowed to elucidate in great detail the European origin of the people who participated in the conquest of the Canary Islands. In the talks, the students and teachers have known first hand the methods used in the Genomics Laboratory of ITER to study the genetic material that we know as mitochondrial DNA (which is inherited in a matrilineal way) and that is massively sequenced in the so-called nucleic acid sequencing platforms and analyzed thanks to the TeideHPC supercomputer, one of the most important supercomputing infrastructures of the country.
During the talks, the audience was also shown, albeit in summary form, some of the other applications being developed in the Genomics Area. Among them, the participation in the Network for Epidemiological Surveillance based on COVID-19 sequencing in the Canary Islands, as part of the national surveillance network RELECOV, and its recent extension to the surveillance of other viruses of interest such as the influenza virus and the respiratory syncytial virus.
The original paper related to the study of mitochondrial DNA is available on the Internet under the title “Digging into the admixture strata of current-day Canary Islanders based on mitogenomes” (source: https://www.cell.com/iscience/fulltext/S2589-0042(22)02180-0).
More information on the school’s website: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/DxPd3MVYVtH7wpf3
