Harnessing Genetics: Choosing and Managing Sport Horses

Hey everybody, welcome to this week's episode of Ask an Expert.

This week, we're joining you on a Monday afternoon, which is a little bit of a new time slot, but it is worth it to cover this topic with the wonderful expert Krista Lafayette.

And today we're covering genetic testing in horses.

I was just telling Krista before this, that this is a topic that I have very little knowledge around and there's a huge area for improvement and learning more about this.

So this is a perfect opportunity to do that.

And before we dive right into the topic at hand, Krista, thank you so much for joining us.

Well, thanks for having me.

I really appreciate it.

And I hope I can live up to your expectations.

You absolutely will.

You will exceed expectations you already have in just your knowledge base on this topic in your bio.

But before I kind of get to know you better, before I dive into some member questions, we would love to just kind of learn about you, Krista.

Where are you based? What's your background? How did you get into this? And kind of what brings you to where you are today?

Oh boy, that's all you want to know.

Okay.

So let's see.

So again, my name is Crystal Lafayette.

I'm the CEO and founder of Avalon and Alpha Dog.

We have dogs now too.

We could talk about that at another time.

And we are located smack dab in the middle of Silicon Valley.

Our offices are out of Menlo Park and we have a lab in Redwood City, which are a stone's throw apart.

And how do I get into this? Well, my expertise is in biotechnology, so specifically around surgical behavioral models of preclinical medicine, which basically means animal research.

And I'm a horse person, and I'd like to do everything possible to reduce the number of animals used in the lab to discover things for human translation and medicine, and for animals as well, right? And this company, long story short, is a way to do that.

So to go, I finally got my own horse.