DNA has fantastic stories to tell

Applying genetic knowledge from livestock and zoo animals to the conservation of wild species. Biologist and ‘wayfinder’ Mirte Bosse is working on cross-pollination between pigs and elephants. ‘To my colleagues in Amsterdam I’m the livestock breeder, and in Wageningen I’m the ecologist from Amsterdam. But I see myself primarily as someone who applies genomic research to evolution, ecology and conservation. I do this deliberately in two places because it adds value. At Animal Breeding and Genetics in Wageningen I work alongside researchers who use large volumes of high-quality genetic data to develop tools for improving livestock farming, whilst at A-Life in Amsterdam I ensure that this knowledge is embedded in an ecological and evolutionary context. It combines the best of two worlds for my passion: nature conservation’, says biologist Mirte Bosse (born 1982) in mid-July at the O|2 Lab Building of Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam. She received this summer’s Wayfinder Award 2025 from the National Geographic Society. ‘Until recently I’d never heard of that prize either’, Bosse admits. It is an award sponsored by car manufacturer KIA, given to fifteen international researchers who ‘demonstrate innovative leadership in science, conservation, education, technology and storytelling’. Bosse smiles: ‘I can now call myself a National Geographic Explorer, and that does open doors.’ Gorillas Bosse was captivated by apes as a schoolgirl. ‘My parents took me to see Gorillas in the Mist, the dramatic life story of the murdered American primatologist Dian Fossey. Not a film for children, but apparently I mostly screamed at the top of my lungs when the poachers attacked the gorillas’, she recalls. After studying biology at VU Amsterdam, she carried out doctoral research in Wageningen from 2010 to 2015 on the genomes of wild and domesticated pigs (Sus scrofa), followed by a short postdoc on great tits (Parus major) at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology (NIOO-KNAW). Thanks to a Veni grant (2017) and a Vidi grant (2025), she partly returned to VU Amsterdam and is now researching inbreeding avoidance in Asian elephants (Elephas maximus).

‘Everyone’s first thought when it comes to inbreeding is domesticated animals, and in breeding programmes they do indeed make every effort to prevent the harmful and detrimental effects of predominantly recessive alleles’, says Bosse. ‘My research on pigs shows, incidentally, that European pig breeds have more genetic diversity than European wild boar. This is because European pig breeds have deliberately been crossed with Chinese Meishan pigs to improve fertility and fat content. Wild pigs originated roughly one million years ago in South-East Asia, and it was only much later that pigs were independently domesticated in Asia and Europe from very different wild populations. Domestic pig breeds in China are genetically far more diverse than European ones, because only the wild pig population in Europe passed through a bottleneck during the ice age.’ Ecologists often overlook domesticated animals, but Bosse uses them as an ideal source of inspiration for promoting genetic diversity in threatened wild species.

Risk of extinction ‘We have a great deal of high-quality information about genetic patterns associated with the adaptive physiology of domesticated animals, but virtually nothing for wild-living animals. And the wonderful thing about DNA is that you can extract information from it about population size or about when a species passed through a genetic bottleneck. The entire history of a species is locked within its genome. DNA really does tell us fantastic stories’, says Bosse. It is her dream to use DNA from wild populations – which are struggling with habitat fragmentation and dwindling numbers – to quantify genetic erosion and, with it, the risk of extinction. She is now doing this for Asian elephants, among others, of which around 35,000 still live in the wild and some 350 are kept in European zoos. ‘In collaboration with Rotterdam Zoo (Diergaarde Blijdorp), the studbook keeper for the Asian elephant, we have used blood samples to map the DNA of zoo elephants of different origins at high resolution. From this we identify genomic regions that are specific to a region of origin or that indicate vulnerability to inbreeding. This makes it possible to determine the genetic relatedness and vulnerability of populations using dung samples and simple, inexpensive DNA tests’, says Bosse.

Reinforcement The work yields datasets and tools that help some twenty regional partners – including the Wildlife Institute of India – determine where the exchange of animals or the restoration of connectivity offers the best chance of genetic reinforcement of the population and the preservation of biodiversity. ‘It can also shed light on other intriguing questions’, Bosse observes. ‘For instance, the population of small elephants on Borneo was recently recognised as the fourth subspecies of the Asian elephant, alongside the three already known subspecies in Sri Lanka, Sumatra, and mainland India and South-East Asia. Yet there are no validated finds of elephant fossils on Borneo, so perhaps the population has only been present there for a few hundred years. There are even stories that it descends from a gift from Java, in which case it would represent a surviving branch of the Javan elephant, long thought to be extinct. These are complex evolutionary questions to which we hope DNA will provide answers.’

See also: –Mirte Bosse, Evolutionary Genomics Scientist, Explorer Since 2025 – Explorer Home, National Geographic Society