SHEHZAD Wasim

Wasim Shehzad is currently Director of the Institute of Biochemistry and Biotechnology in Lahore, Pakistan. His research covers a wide range of fields using non-invasive DNA sampling in complex biological materials from food remains or soils. The quality and quantity of such DNA is low compared to DNA extracted from tissue samples. This approach is applicable to the identification of rare and threatened species, as it does not require direct contact with these species, which are generally very difficult to study. With the advent of high throughput sequencing and meta-barcoding approaches, it is now possible to generate millions of sequences from many biological species from a single sample. Using these approaches to study the diet of endangered cats in South Asia, Wasim Shehzad supported a PhD from the Université de Grenoble, under the supervision of Pierre Taberlet and François Pompanon au Laboratoire d'Ecologie Alpine (LECA).