Meet Pedro Sá, Ph.D. candidate at the Wageningen University and Research, working on the GEroNIMO project

Epigenetics fascinates me. The way I see it, it is an impressive layer of biological coding, concealing information. Like a “puppet master” of genes, responsible for intricate phenotypic twists and turns. My interest in epigenetics and animal resources brought me to Wageningen, where I am a PhD candidate working on this amazing international project that is pushing forward the boundaries of what we know about epigenetics – the GEroNIMO project.

But my story started much earlier! I grew up in a small farmhouse, just outside Porto in Portugal. I was a real challenge for my parents: I was always running around in the mud, feeding too much hay to the sheep and always letting the chickens run free. What can I say, I was a curious little devil!

I moved away from that small town when I embarked on my academic journey, where I developed a keen interest in understanding how things work. During my undergraduate degree in Genetics, I became very interested in understanding the intricate and complex mechanisms that control and regulate genomic “coding”. During this time, I completed an extensive internship studying modern molecular techniques for the analysis of gene expression and regulation. I was fortunate to apply these techniques as part of a volunteer internship at the Centre for Genomic Medicine in Boston, Massachusetts, focusing on the detection and analysis of diseases with trinucleotide expansion.

It soon became clear to me the significant role sequencing technologies and bioinformatics tools would play in the next chapters of the genetics story. So I got to work and enrolled in a master’s program in bioinformatics and computational biology, which gave me extensive contact with multiple computer scripting languages, statistical and data mining tools. I spent a year working on my master thesis focusing on the development of genomic analysis pipelines, and their application in Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS) at the Laboratory of Animal Genetics Resources, in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Animal Health (CIISA), in Lisbon. I had the opportunity to apply these pipelines in a population genomic analysis, studying an African domestic pig population. It was during this time that I got interested in applied research. I was amazed at the power of genomics in better shaping animal resources. But genomics is only one level of coding. There are other types of biological coding, ever more interesting and ever more complex! And if there’s one thing I learned about nature, it is how good it is in concealing its secrets. But it won’t keep them for long!

I am now interested in studying epigenetic mechanisms that can be responsible for increasing efficiency in animal production. With more detail, I am curious about the impact of epigenetic modifications in quantitative trait loci that may be associated with important livestock features.

As you can imagine from this everlasting speech, I am a very passionate and dedicated individual, and I am putting my skills to good use in unravelling the genetic and epigenetic backgrounds of animal traits. My curiosity has led me from the wet lab to the dry lab, and I am fortunate to be able to work in both areas: from sampling and extracting genetic material for sequencing to the processing and analysis tasks using bioinformatics tools.

It seems that I have come a long way from my little farmhouse! My journey has taken me through several cities and countries, which I find very gratifying. I have also been able to collaborate with people from all over the world and share information and experiences. Now I am intrigued to see where the GEroNIMO project will take me next!