Cheetah Conservation Fund

We are finally getting close to having a functioning genetics laboratory at the Cheetah Conservation Fund here in Namibia! It was quite a saga to get everything to this stage, but thanks to Dr. Laurie Marker's vision and a lot of helping hands from *Dr. Stephen O'Brien's lab where I did my PhD., we are now ready to start. I would like to send a very special thank you to Dr. Mike Helms who has been very supportive and helpful in moving things forward for us in the US, along with Dr. Bruce Brewer who made it all work on the Namibian side of things, and the Ohrstrom Foundation which provided funding to get this project going forward. We finally have all the most important equipment and are anxious to get started with the laboratory work.

 

Thanks to the generous donation of PCR machines, a Sequence Analyzer, and reagents from Applied Biosystems the basis for the Laboratory is covered. In order to thank Applied Biosystems for their generous support the official name of the laboratory is: Applied Biosystems Genetic Conservation Laboratory. Additional donations from private individuals and the surplus department of the National Institutes of Health, as well as funding from the Ohrstrom Foundation provided valuable equipment such as a UV work station, centrifuges, pipettemen, electrophoresis systems and a camera system for the visualization of DNA, spectrophotometer, scales, glassware, and other lab ware. We want to thank everybody for their support.   Regarding the genetic markers, 20 genetic microsatellite markers were selected based on previous work done at Dr. Stephen O'Brien's laboratory. They were redesigned in order to be adapted to genetic work with degraded DNA and arrived … this week … at CCF. This is great news since they were on backorder in the US since July. The markers will allow to identify individuals from scat samples and to test for relatedness as well as population structure. The data collected during years of research on cheetahs performed at CCF will provide the framework for the genetic work.   One of the major motivating factors in having a laboratory in Namibia is to be able to process samples locally instead of having to send African samples to the US and Europe. This has several advantages including decreasing the dependence of Namibia from other countries and allowing Namibian students to be exposed to genetic research and conservation at CCF, at the same time avoiding the complications of sample export.   We are currently working on an expansion of the genetics laboratory: we will build a separate room in which we will perform scat DNA work. This state of the art non-invasive genetics laboratory will have a high level of contamination control and will be exclusively used for degraded DNA.

We are happy to accept genetic laboratory interns, preferably with previous genetics or molecular biology laboratory experience. At the CCF genetics lab you will be involved in sample collection, inventorying and processing of tissue samples as well as non-invasive samples, DNA extractions and amplification, as well as data analysis. Which work will be done at the time of your visit will depend on the status of the project(s), your experience, and the time you will be able to spend with us in the laboratory. If you are interested in genetic work performed at the Cheetah Conservation Fund, please feel free to contact me. If you are interested in contributing to our laboratory (a lot of our equipment is second hand and prone to break), you may check out our wish list or contact me directly, any help is welcome. For myself, I can only say that this is an exciting time to join the Cheetah Conservation Fund and that I can't wait to see the laboratory grow!

Click here to view the various projects we have planned.

Kind regards,

Anne Schmidt-Küntzel, DVM, PhD
Scientist, Genetics Laboratory Manager
Applied Biosystems Genetic Conservation Laboratory
Email CCF Namibia Genetics Lab

*Watch an interview with Dr. Steve O'Brien on CCF's YouTube.com channel: ccfcheetah. Click here.