📣GSA 2025 Award winners! 📣 All winners will be presenting at 🧬GSA 2025 🧬 in Waipapa Taumata Rau (The University of Auckland) in Aotearoa (New Zealand). 🚨Reminder to submit your abstracts by April 7th and register to hear these amazing researchers present their work!

Congratulations 🏆 Margaret Byrne (Conservation and Attractions, Australia), the winner of the MJD White Medal 2025 for excellence in #genetics research!

Congratulations 🏆 Catherine Grueber (University of Sydney) Catherine Grueber, the winner of the Ross Crozier Medal 2025 for a mid-career researcher 5-15 years post-PhD!

Congratulations 🏆 Ashley Jones (Australian National University) Ashley Jones, the winner of the Alan Wilton Award 2025 for an early career researcher up to 5 years post-PhD!

Congratulations 🏆 Stephanie Waller (University of Otago), the winner of the D.G. Catcheside Prize 2025 for the top Australasian doctoral student in the field of #genetics!

Congratulations 🏆 Adi Nugroho (University of New South Wales), Dineth Pathirana (University of Sydney), Rebecca McKee (University of Sydney), Usaid Shayan (University of Waikato), the winners of the Spencer Smith-White Travel Award 2025 for a postgraduate member of GSA!

Congratulations 🏆 Shelley Young (University of Sydney), the winner of the Philip Batterham Conference Prize 2025 for an Honours/Masters student member of GSA!

News that tens of thousands of submissions on the Treaty Principles Bill may not enter the public record is deeply concerning and will potentially deny future researchers access to this material. buttondown.com/unsettling/arc…

🚨 GSA abstract submission extension: make sure to get your abstracts in by Monday 14th 23:59 NZST / 21:59 AEST 🐑🍃🐀🦎🌼🐟🥝🦟🦕🌳💻🦉 No matter your flavour of genetics, you'll find it in Aotearoa (New Zealand) on the 7th - 10th of July! gsa-2025.com

Reminder: early bird registration for 🧬GSA 2025🧬 closes on the 11th of May! gsa-2025.com

Early bird 🦤 registration has been extended until Monday 26 May 11:59pm NZST! Make sure to register within the next 2 weeks to lock in your spot for GSA 2025 💥

Join over 210 delegates plus 20 sponsor representatives for our amazing GSA conference 2025! 🧬🥝 Final Registration deadline: Mon 23 June gsa-2025.com/registration Check out our schedule of 92 amazing talks plus 39 posters here: gsa-2025.com/program

The next online Asia-Pacific #genetics and #genomics Seminar Series will occur on the 9th of July🧬! Catherine Grueber will discuss her amazing research on preserving biodiversity and ecological resilience using genetic approaches. See the below flyer for details:

Just three more sleeps until #GSA2025 kicks off in Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland! Bring your love of science, your curiosity, and maybe a rain jacket - just in case 🌧️🧬 We can't wait to see you there!

The Genetics Society of AustralAsia is officially moving to BlueSky! Want to stay up to date with all things Genetics in AustralAsia? Follow us at @geneticsaus.bsky.social

Delighted to share this beautiful work from Hui Zhen - great news for our hihi WGS dataset, but also a very handy general workflow applicable to testing imputation in wild populations

Genomic imputation can boost dataset quality and benefit wild population research. In hihi, we found high #imputation accuracies despite a small reference panel of high-fecundity individuals, improving downstream #ConservationGenomics analyses. Molecular Ecology buff.ly/AJMEfqn

We used Beagle v5.4 to test various imputation parameters and input data structures. We achieved mean r² > 0.95 in most tests except at very low target SNP densities and reference panel sizes. Surprisingly, adding a #linkagemap (Tan et al., 2024) didn’t improve accuracy!

We found that heterozygosity estimates and the site frequency spectrum using imputed genotypes were more sensitive to filtering and SNP density. Runs of homozygosity (ROH) using #RZooRoH were relatively robust, perhaps because imputed genotype likelihoods were used as input.

Thank you to my amazing supervisor Anna Santure and amazing team of co-authors: Katarina Stuart, Tram Vi, Annabel Whibley, Sarah Bailey, Patricia Brekke #WomenInSTEM