Expert meeting about commercialisation of marine biotechnology

On October 11th, I went to Faro (University of Algarve) to attend an expert meeting about commercialisation of marine biotechnology. The meeting was arranged by the Royal Embassy of Norway, and the participants consisted of both Norwegian and Portuguese scientists, companies and funding agencies. The aim of the meeting was to generate a basis for bilateral scientific and industrial collaborations within the field between the two countries and to inform the participants about available funding resources for their collaborations. A brief summary of the meeting can be found here (in Portuguese):

We had round table discussions about potential collaboration topics (picture taken by 

Åshild Fløgstad Svensson from the Embassy)

As a result of this meeting I’m going to meet scientists from the University of Azores and BioCant in Cantanhede (close to Coimbra) next week, to discuss potential future collaboration projects between these two groups, my research associates at the University of Tromsø (UiT) and me here at the ITQB. The idea is work out collaboration projects for which we will apply for funding from both The Research Council of Norway (RCN) and the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) in Portugal.

I really appreciate this initiative from the Norwegian Embassy in Portugal and I hope they follow up on it. During the meeting it was clearly illustrated that there is a big potential for collaborative projects within marine biotechnology which both countries would benefit from in the future, and there are funding recourses available for this both in Norway and in Portugal. However, for purely scientific collaborations there is still a job to do, and my wish is that the RCN and the FCT establishes a bilateral research programme from which we could apply directly for funding for collaborations with fellow Portuguese scientists.

If I had not been here in Portugal doing my Marie Curie fellowship I would never have been invited (or invited myself as I in fact did) to go to this meeting. I think this illustrates very well the value of going abroad for some time during your research career. I have now been able to establish new scientific contacts which I would never get if I was working in Norway at this moment.


By the way, Faro is a nice place to visit, and it takes less than three hours to get there from Lisbon by car. I really envy the Portuguese their highway system - we can only dream about have something like that in Norway :-)

Anaerobic conditions and holidays

The last couple of weeks we have faced some problems in the lab, but we have overcome them, and are now ready for the EPR experiment next week. This time we purified our protein anaerobically, which means that we have performed all the work in an anaerobic chamber (it looks more or less like the one in the photo from the manufacturer Belle Technology). This makes the work a bit more cumbersome, since you have to remove the oxygen from all the solutions and the equipment you are using for the purification, and do all the work inside the chamber using thick gloves. I'm sure Margarida agrees with me, since she did most of the work in the chamber which is located in one of the cold rooms :-)

Tomorrow (October 5th) it is a holiday in Portugal. It is the Republic day, "Implantação da República", which celebrates the end of the monarchy and the beginning of the Portuguese republic in 1910. Due to the financial crisis in the country it has been decided to cancel this holiday from next year on, so it is the last time the Portuguese will have this holiday. So, I should perhaps say, happy last Republic holiday! Not so sure the people will really enjoy it since it looks like most of them will face a 4% increase in tax from next year on…..