Photo provided Individuals, including Giorgia Auteri, left front, work at a conservation genetics workshop at the Institute of Forestry at Tribhuvan University in Katmandu, Nepal, using materials that were crafted by a 3-D printer in Columbus, Indiana’s Propeller makerspace.
A Columbus East High School graduate recently used materials created at a local makerspace to help facilitate a conservation genetics workshop in Nepal.
Giorgia Auteri graduated from East in 2006 and is now an assistant professor of biology at Missouri State University (MSU). She left for Nepal in mid-July and returned to the states on Aug. 12.
Her brother, Matteo Auteri, is a lab technician at Columbus Propeller, which provided 3-D printed materials that were used in the workshop.
In 2022, Giorgia Auteri was awarded a grant from Conservation Nation for a project focusing on Himalayan black bears in the mid-to-high hills of Nepal. According to the organization’s website, this species faces several threats, including poaching, climate change, “habit degradation and fragmentation” and conflicts with communities due to bears’ use of agricultural resources.
“To help inform conservation decisions, Giorgia and her Nepalese collaborator, Suman Shree Neupane, will collect and analyze DNA isolated from bear fecal samples,” Conservation Nation said in an online brief about the project. “They will use the information from the DNA to understand components essential to bear conservation, including genetic diversity, food sources, important movement corridors, and bear populations of concern.”
Other organizations have been involved with the project include the Rufford Foundation, which also provided grants, and the Nanu Foundation, Auteri said.
She added that Neupane, who is an MSU grad student, was the mastermind of the project in many ways and collected a lot of the initial data when he was still living in Nepal. Collecting samples was a joint effort among multiple partners, she said.
According to Auteri, Conservation Nation’s grant stipulated that also they needed to hold at least three outreach events.
One such event was a conservation genetics workshop at the Institute of Forestry at Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu, Nepal on July 30.
When asked about the origin of the workshop, Auteri said that she and Neupane originally wanted to hire someone to extract DNA from the fecal samples so that it would be easier to export their findings.
“We actually couldn’t find someone in Nepal to do it for us,” she said. “And that was really surprising, because it’s a pretty simple thing to do, from a lab work perspective. So it really got me thinking about how there isn’t a lot of capacity in the country to do that kind of work. There are some private labs, but because there’s so few people that do it, they can kind of charge what they want, like ridiculously astronomical rates.”
They decided it would be best to do the work themselves and also hold a training workshop to help increase the number of people in the country who can perform such tasks.
The first half of the event was lecture-based and focused on the theoretical background for conservation genetics. During the second half, students got hands-on equipment training.
That was where Propeller’s contributions came into play.
In the summer of 2022, Auteri needed to purchase research equipment to start up her own lab at MSU and wanted to do so as cheaply as possible. Her brother printed out some of the equipment for her lab as a way to test Propeller’s 3-D printers.
This allowed her to save costs on equipment, so she decided to do it again for some of the workshop materials, such as tube racks.
“Even the simple stuff is really expensive, normally,” Auteri said. “And so, by making a bunch of little cheap versions of this stuff, it helped allow, it helped create a scenario where we could do this cheaply and have a set-up where students have their own sort of mini set-ups of equipment that they could take with them from station to station.”
