Christian Groß

My PhD project is about scoring deleterious variations in the genomes of livestock.

We as homo sapiens have all relatively similar genomes, otherwise we would not be human, but they are also not identical because then we would be all identical twins. These small differences in our genomes are creating all the differences which we can see if we look at each other.  Most of the time these variations in our genomes are relatively benign and just cause differences in our looks but sometimes they can cause a severe genetic defect. Then they are limiting the survivability and the chance to reproduce of the individual. That is generally described with the term “Deleteriousness”. I am trying to score genome variations according to their deleteriousness and I am not doing that for human but for livestock. Pig, cattle and chicken, in particular. Therefore I am working in close collaboration with the Animal Breeding and Genetics Group in Wageningen.