CryoStore at the University of South Bohemia - João Gil Gomes Ferreira

PhD 6 - Heritable and nonheritable changes in offspring produced via surrogate parents from cryopreserved germ stem cells in fish

My name is João Gil Gomes Ferreira, and I’m from Porto (Portugal). I completed my bachelor's at ICBAS University of Porto and graduated in aquatic field sciences. For my master's, I studied at the University of Algarve in Aquaculture and Fisheries. During my academic years, I learned skills from different fields, from cryopreservation to pathology, from marine species physiology to biochemistry. I did my master's thesis in organoids at the Faculty of Fisheries and Water Protection in the Czech Republic, where we created the first protocol for gonadal organoid formation in fish using a sturgeon.

In 2023, I did my first poster presentation exposing my results on gonadal fish organoids for the 12th International Symposium on Reproductive Physiology in Fish in Greece. This work was supervised by Dr Rafel Nobrega and Dr Martin Pšenička and funded by FAPESP-GACR (21/03739-3) and Aquaexcel 3.0 (2020-2025).

Currently, I’m a PhD student at FFWP—Laboratory of Germ Cells (LGC), under the supervision of Dr. Martin Pšenička, for the Cryostore project. This project aims to assess and categorise heritable and non-hereditable epigenetic changes in offspring produced via surrogate parents from cryopreserved germ stem cells in zebrafish.