February 2026 talk of the monthly meeting of the #animal-genomics special interest group.

It is a pleasure to announce the forthcoming talk by Ted Kalbfleisch (Gluck Equine Research Center, University of Kentucky, USA). Ted Kalbfleisch is a Professor and the Janet H. Koller Endowed Chair of Equine Bioinformatics in the Department of Veterinary Science, at the University of Kentucky. He is from Louisville, Kentucky, and received his B.S. in Chemistry from the University of Louisville in 1988. He proceeded to Boston University where he received his PhD in Physical Chemistry in 1994 and stayed on to do a postdoc in Chemical Physics. He went to work for the next 8 years in the genomics industry in New Haven, Connecticut, and moved back to academia with his alma mater, the University of Louisville. While there, he led the effort to build the EquCab3 assembly. He moved to the University of Kentucky in 2019, and his lab has since built reference quality assemblies for 10 species of rat, and the current T2T assemblies for both the horse, and the donkey. He is currently leading the USDA/NIFA funded Blueprint Grant to create a pangenome for the horse and other equids.

The Post-Genome Era: How Did We Get Here, and Where We Are Going

The Human Genome Project was initiated in 1988 and culminated in 2002 with the release of the first assembled reference genome for humans. Over the next decade, reference quality genomes followed for many mammalian species, namely model organisms such as mouse and rat, and agricultural species: the horse, cow, sheep, and pigs. In 2022 The Human T2T project released a Telomere-to-Telomere assembly derived from a single human haplotype. It is now routine to produce haplotype phased assemblies to the T2T standard. The current reference genomes for the horse and donkey are built to the T2T standard, and the Ruminant T2T project is its 2nd year. In this post-genome era, the challenge is to understand the biology encoded by the sequences we can now measure so accurately, precisely, and completely. We’ve begun moving in this direction by creating pangenomes, with which we enumerate all haplotypes shared by species with the aim of associating them with phenotypes. In this seminar, we will discuss the technologies that moved us this far and describe the future of this work.