As a conservation geneticist, Dr. Joshua Miller has studied bighorn sheep, Galapagos tortoises, fish, pine trees and polar bears. But it was his experience with ostriches that caught the eye of RDAR, a producer-guided funder of agricultural research in Alberta.

For the past year, the assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences together with lab instructor Victoria Bowles and their students have been working on a genetics project initiated by RDAR to help assess reproductive success and increase genetic diversity within farmed populations of the world’s largest bird species.

Students in the Winter 2023 GENE 400: Genome Organization course kicked off the project by finding a set of genetic markers that could be used to build genetic profiles of individual ostriches on a single farm in Southern Alberta. “Our ultimate goal was essentially to build a big family tree of the farm’s breeding stock,” explains Dr. Miller.

When the course ended, Linda Moebes continued the work with a MacEwan Undergraduate Student Research Initiative (USRI) project. She spent the summer after she graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Biological Sciences perfecting the process of extracting DNA from ostrich feathers and testing ways to sequence multiple pieces of genetic information simultaneously.

“It was an incredible learning experience,” says Moebes. “I got to witness, quite literally through gel images in a transilluminator, my improvement in laboratory techniques.” 

Using the lab protocol Moebes perfected, Keira Warkentin, a fourth-year Biological Sciences major spent the Fall 2023 term creating unique genetic profiles for 42 individual birds as her independent research project. Dr. Miller’s Winter 2024 GENE 400 class is now continuing the work Warkentin started and adding another 40 individual birds from the farm to the data set.

Once that big pool of data is in place, work can begin to see how members of the flock are related and which birds are most successful at producing chicks. Those findings have real-world implications for farmers – monitoring genetic diversity and identifying when it’s time to introduce new individual birds to the flock can prevent inbreeding. And knowing which birds are producing chicks and which aren’t can affect a farm’s bottom line.

The bottom line for Dr. Miller when it comes to working with a community partner to include real-world data in his classes?

“Not only is it a lot of fun, but students also really seem to appreciate being involved in an ongoing project that has real-world implications – there is immediate  interest and buy-in from students.”

It’s also an opportunity for Dr. Miller to illustrate the impact the skillset that students are building can ultimately have. “This project is an example of the sweet spot where knowing and using molecular techniques can answer important questions for different stakeholders. In this case, it’s agriculture, but we can apply the same techniques to the conservation management of any species. That’s exciting.”