About the talk

What does fertility look like through the lens of systems biology? In this talk, I would like to share four stories from carnivore reproduction research, each exploring fertility from a different angle: from fertility preservation in domestic cat model, to assessing environmental effect on male fertility and predicting the functional impact of genetic load in black-footed ferrets; to the ongoing research into unraveling reproductive adaptations in the Iberian lynx. Using transcriptomic, proteomic, and genomic data, I will show how network-based approaches help us connect molecular layers and uncover the dynamic systems that shape reproductive success.

About the speaker

Olga Amelkina is a Research Biologist at the Department of Reproduction Biology, Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (IZW), Berlin, and a Research Associate at the Center for Species Survival, Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute, Washington, DC. Her research focuses on reproductive biology, fertility preservation and transcriptomics (both coding and non-coding) in carnivore species, with a special focus on felids. She earned her MSc from Novosibirsk State University in Russia, where she studied domestication of foxes and rats at the Laboratory of Evolutionary Genetics, Institute of Cytology and Genetics. She completed her PhD at Humboldt University of Berlin, investigating reproductive adaptations in lynx species at IZW. Her first postdoc was at the Faculty of Veterinary Sciences, Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, where she studied the kisspeptin system in felids. She then joined the Smithsonian Institute for a second postdoc focused on developing fertility preservation methods in felids. After that, she held a Research Fellow position at the University of Leeds, investigating the role of microRNAs in mammalian implantation.