Dr Haylea Power is a research scientist at CSIRO’s Environomics Future Science Platform, where she has spent the past seven years developing new tools to bring genomic resolution to environmental monitoring. Her research bridges flow cytometry, molecular biology, and ecological genomics to establish non-invasive approaches for studying biodiversity and animal populations in aquatic environments. Drawing on methodologies more commonly applied in cancer biology, forensics, and biomedical research, Haylea and her team have pioneered the isolation and genetic analysis of environmental metazoan cells—whole animal cells shed into seawater and captured using fluorescence-activated cell sorting.
Her work has expanded the scope of environmental DNA (eDNA) by enabling the recovery of both mitochondrial and nuclear genomic information from individual cells, moving beyond presence–absence detection to individual identification and population-level genotyping. This approach, known as emCell-Seq, opens new pathways for conservation, fisheries, and biosecurity applications by providing direct access to metazoan DNA without the need for physical capture or invasive sampling. Haylea’s work highlights the power of flow cytometry as a cross-disciplinary tool to solve pressing environmental challenges through cell-based genomic insights.