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!

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…..

Article about my project in "Forskerforum"

Oh, and I almost forgot to tell you that an article about my research has been published in the Journal for the members of the The Norwegian Association of Researchers (NAR) , "Forskerforum". In an interview with my PhD student Kjersti Lian they are describing our interest in studying the DNA repair systems in Deinococcus radiodurans :-) Read the whole article here (page 26-28)! Kjersti, thank you for your effort!!!







Travelling, holidays and new techniques

In the end of July I went to Grenoble, to visit my PhD student who at the time was working in the lab of Dr. Joanna Timmins at the Institut de Biologie Structurale (IBS). I had two good days there, discussing the last results and making plans for the last six months of the project. It is always good to come to Grenoble. I have been a visitor in the Structural Biology Group at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) a couple of times, so it's almost like coming home:-)

In August, I went on holidays...... in Portugal. It is really a wonderful country, which has so many interesting places to visit. This time I went to Caramulo, a small town in the centre of the country, relatively close to Viseu. Even though it is a very small place it has a very nice museum, Museu do Caramulo, with a big art and car collection - not the kind of museum you expect to find in a small place like this. Other than the museum, the place the ideal for hiking, and resting :-) The landscape in this region it very beautiful and I'm definitely going back there - but then also spending time visiting the Dão wineries!!!

Ok, back to work I went to Norway, to visit my old lab at the University of Tromsø. It was nice to be back, to meet my old colleagues and friends again. I had meetings with my PhD students, and other collaborators to discuss manuscripts which is almost ready for submission :-)

In between all this travelling, we have prepared more protein samples for a new EPR experiment which will take place in October. We also had meetings with the head of the Raman Spectroscopy group here at the ITQB, Smilja Todorovic, in order to discuss the possibility of doing some experiments with my proteins. Raman spectroscopy seems very complicated to me, and they need very concentrated samples for the analysis (~ 30 mg/ml - fortunately only 2 µl), but it will give us more information about the state and nature of the metal centres of my proteins which is one of the main goals of the project. I think now I’m really benefitting from performing my project a multidisciplinary institute, having the luxury of just going up one floor to find a fully equipped Raman spectroscopy lab and all the expertise you need to get the experiment done and the results analysed. I really look forward to learn more about this technique.

And next week I'll finally start learning the Portuguese language at the Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas da Universidade Nova de Lisboa. It will be a busy autumn :-)

Monitoring visit

Yesterday Project Officer Zakaria Benameur from the European Commission came to the ITQB for a monitoring visit. The aim of the visit was to monitor both scientific and administrative aspects of my Marie Curie fellowship. He first spent two hours with the administration at the ITQB, and then one hour with me and the Scientist in Charge of the project Professor Maria Arménia Carrondo. I gave a presentation about the background of my project and an update on the status so far. After the meeting I gave Mr. Benameur a short visit of the research facilities of the Macromolecular Crystallography Unit.

I think it was nice and very useful to have this monitoring visit. I got some new ideas about other funding resources within the European Commission I can apply for in order to continue my research when the money for this project runs out. It was also nice to actually meet the person who I have exchanged several e-mails with after my project was selected for funding within the Marie Curie programme J

With a new picture I found of the ITQB (nice surroundings for research) I wish you a nice weekend!

The ITQB day

Today it is the ITQB day, and we have now attended a gathering in the auditorium, with speeches by the ITQB director and the principal of Universidade Nova de Lisboa and people who where rewarded for their scientific work in 2011. Soon we will go to the “Sardinhada”, were there will be served grilled sardines (typical for Portugal), meat for the cowards (including me) and refreshments J And the party will go on for some time I think.....

Bom fim de semana/Have a nice weekend!