DANTAisms

Dr. Mirte Bosse

Ever since her Bachelors in Biology and Masters in ecology, Mirte has been interested in the genomic consequences of population size reductions and inbreeding from a conservation point of view. She is convinced that genomic tools will become of high importance for conservation efforts in the near future. During her PhD research at the Wageningen University (Netherlands) she investigated genomic variation within wild boars, domesticated pigs and closely related species to detect signatures of selection, inbreeding and hybridization.This work was published in Nature. She then worked as a postdoc at the Netherlands Institute for Ecological Research (NIOO-KNAW) to study population genetics in the European great tit, as part of the Grat tit HapMap consortium.

Currently, Mirte is a postdoctoral researcher at WUR on a project on the prediction of deleterious alleles and inbreeding load. She developed methods to optimize breeding/conservation programmes based on genome-wide information, so that inbreeding is avoided as much as possible. The fundamentals of these genomics studies exceed species boundaries and are applicable to a variety of endangered populations and species.

Mirte gladly communicates her research to a broader, non-scientific audience- “It’s all in the mix- hybrids in nature.”

When she’s not analyzing genomes, Mirte can most often be found in the forest for long hikes, trying to find monkeys (her high-school crush she never grew out of). But since monkeys are scarce in the Netherlands, she often swaps the forest for the tennis- or hockeyfield, which can become equally wild 🙂