Our Partners

Who we're working with on the Cute Egg project

Not all of the work in our project is done at The Roslin Institute and the School of Chemistry at Edinburgh University. We are working with scientists at the University of Glasgow, who each week measure the cuticles of thousands of eggs. This data is combined with the genetic information that we have for each egg and bird in the study. The scientists in Glasgow also study the bacteria found in eggs that have very high and very low quality cuticles to investigate how cuticle quality affects bacterial invasion.

We also work with industrial partners Lohmann Tierzucht and Aviagen, who provide us with egg samples and related genetic information, sharing both their resources and their knowledge. They help us decide how to design our custom instrumentation so that it can be used for measuring cuticle quality in the real world of egg production. They will also field-test the final product for us.

The Cute Egg activity kits created as part of this project are funded by BBSRC, the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, and have been distributed to farmers by the charity LEAF (Linking Environment and Farming).