Webinars

Engineering Biology in Farmed Animals — Webinar Series

The Engineering Biology in Farmed Animals webinar series will showcase emerging technologies, tools, resources and research supporting the application of engineering biology to challenges in farmed animal health, welfare and sustainable production. Webinars will feature presentations from researchers in academia and industry who are developing new capabilities, generating valuable data and resources, and applying engineering biology approaches across farmed species.

 

Webinar 2: Engineering biology in poultry - From Discovery to Application

Thursday 19 November 2026, 14:30–15:30 GMT

Register here

The second webinar in the series will explore how engineering biology is advancing our understanding of chicken development and enabling faster generation of gene-edited lines. Bringing together academic research and an industry perspective from Cobb-Vantress, the session will consider how these capabilities could support poultry breeding, alongside the opportunities and barriers to their practical application.

 

Speakers 

Avian Transgenics: Past, Present and Future

Dr James Glover (The Roslin Institute, University of Edinburgh)

  • Introduction and brief history of avian transgenics.
  • Current approaches using primordial germ cell (PGC) technologies.
  • Next-generation avian models, including the FuChi cell cycle reporter chicken line.
  • Future directions and opportunities in chicken transgenic technologies.
EB2 Webinar 2

Translating and Scaling Innovation: Lessons from Crops Applied to Livestock

Dr Mark Cigan (Managing Director, Genetic Innovation, Cobb-Vantress)

  • Moving from laboratory discovery to on-farm commercial application requires time, cross-functional teams, investment, regulatory approval, IP protection, and producer and consumer trust.
  • Early crop-industry failures often reflected an unclear product vision, poor coordination between biotechnology and breeding, and insufficient focus on economic value.
  • These lessons reinforced the importance of “starting with the end in mind”: traits must create value, benefit the animal, remain durable, and perform across commercial breeding populations.
  • Building on these principles, crop and swine biotechnology examples illustrate how innovation can be translated into differentiated, scalable poultry products.

Webinar 1: Advancing Tools, Data and Discovery

Thursday 8 October 2026

The first webinar in the series explored how advances in tools, technologies and genomic data are supporting engineering biology research in farmed animals. Our speakers highlighted progress in understanding livestock genomes and introduced the research expertise and capabilities of the Roslin Engineering Biology Hub.


Speakers

Over a decade of FAANG data - demonstrating the value via community resources including Ensembl
Dr Emily Clark (EMBL-EBI)

  • A brief history of FAANG and the EuroFAANG projects.
  • The FAANG data portal and the value of highly curated metadata.
  • Regulatory annotations in Ensembl for farmed animals as an example of a community resource enabled by FAANG data.
  • The future, the new Ensembl platform, and what might be possible in the next decade with AI and other technologies.

The Roslin Engineering Biology Hub: Driving innovation in Agritech
Dr Finn Grey (The Roslin Institute, University of Edinburgh)

  • Introducing the Roslin Engineering Biology Hub and the engineering biology capabilities being developed to support advances in animal productivity, sustainability and food security.
  • Highlighting how the EB Hub is building a pipeline from fundamental discovery to practical application, from identifying causal genetic variants to rapidly integrating complex traits into farmed animals.

Missed our webinar, Advancing Tools, Data and Discovery? You can now watch the recording above to catch up on presentations exploring advances in livestock genomic data and the Roslin Engineering Biology Hub's research capabilities.

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