New collaborations and results

It has been a long time since posted anything here now. I suppose it means that I have been busy J

I sure have. Regarding the Norway – Portugal collaboration within marine biotechnology, we have had more meetings and are now planning to formalise the collaboration in a meeting at the University of Tromsø in the end of February. My Portuguese collaborators and I am going there to participate in a conference about marine bioprospecting (BioProsp 2013) and at the same time have meetings with our Norwegian collaborators. The aim is to determine a common goal for our research, to decide who is going to do what and when, and sign a collaboration contract. I really look forward to this meeting, to finish this part of the planning so that we can go ahead with the research and start writing and submit project proposals to various funding sources.

Regarding my project, I have also obtained a lot of good results recently. I have used both Raman spectroscopy and performed electrochemistry experiments in order to obtain more information about my proteins. This is techniques I have never used before, so I have of course been completely dependent on receiving help from other scientists (big thanks to Murat Sezer and Smilja Todorovic). It has been fun, and very interesting, and I look forward to continuing these experiments during the winter and spring.

I have also recently been to Paris, where I had a meeting with Professor Suzanne Sommer who is an expert on Deinococcus radiodurans at Institut de Génétique et Microbiologie, Université Paris-Sud. We had a very interesting meeting, and I’m very happy to announce that we have established collaboration. This collaboration will be very important in order for me to test the entire hypothesis I have described in my Marie Curie fellowship proposal, and I really look forward to get going on this work.

Regarding time. I have already finished ten out of my twenty four months here at ITQB. Time goes by very fast, and I’m getting worried that I won’t have time to finish everything that I wanted to do. However, the road changes as you start walking, and I have already used two other methods that I had not described in my project proposal. I have really benefitted immensely from working in a multidisciplinary research institute, however learning new things takes time. I do hope the European commission sees the value of this and forgive me for not following my experimental setup-plan in detail when they evaluate my mid-term report.

Greetings from warm (17°C) and sunny Portugal!