The Ancient Environmental Genomics Initiative for Sustainability (AEGIS)

Summary

This is an abstract from the "2025 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of David J. Meltzer Part II" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

During this talk I will introduce the Ancient Environmental Genomics Initiative for Sustainability (AEGIS) aimed at accelerating and delivering new strategies for developing resilient crops and agricultural systems and hence mitigate the risk of a human food crisis in the face of climate changes. This ambitious goal will be accomplished by combining fundamental research with applied plant and cropping sciences. Through studies across a timespan of millions of years and across the globe, in which climates have changed repeatedly, AEGIS will uncover how organisms have responded to these changes both at the species level, via natural selection, and at the ecosystem level, through organismal interactions and re-arrangements. Each climatic cycle involved novel genetic and organismal configurations not seen since. The talk will cover: the rationale behind AEGIS, introduction to Environmental DNA and Ancient DNA that constitutes the methodological backbone of AEGIS and showcase how we can use the vast record of organismal and ecosystem responses to climate changes to provide targeted solutions for the agricultural industry.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• 2025 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of David J. Meltzer Part II   •
• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51346