Visitors from Innovation Norway (Tromsø office)

Today I recieved a group of visitors from Innovation Norway (the Tromsø office) and a representative from the Norwegian embassy here at the ITQB. The guests learnt more about the ITQB, IBET and BioCant, and I told them about the emerging marine biotech project that I'm involved in here in Portugal. I was excited and very nervous, but I think it went fine. We finished the visit with a nice lunch at Hotel Praia Mar with an excellent view to the sea and Lisbon :-) Pictures will be posted later!
See news at the ITQB homepage!

Open day at the ITQB

Tomorrow, Saturday April 20th, the doors to the ITQB will be open (dia aberto) for visitors who wants to know more about science and research conducted at our institute. There will be activities for children (experiments) and guided tours to see our facilities. It will also be possible to meet scientists and students at the ITQB and ask whatever question you might have about science and/or about being a scientist. I think this is a very good initiative, and a good opportunity for young people to get to know more about the profession (or rather the lifestyle:) scientist.

Welcome!

New IEF call

I know that there is a new call out there now (MARIE CURIE INTRA-EUROPEAN FELLOWSHIPS FOR CAREER DEVELOPMENT), and if anyone has questions regarding the writing of the proposal or how to organise your work, please don't hesitate to contact me! If you are from Norway, I can also recomment you to contact the National contact points for Marie Curie Actions at the Research Council of Norway (you'll find them here). They are always very helpful!

This week I'm off to Paris to work in the lab of Professor Suzanne Sommer at Paris Sud Universite :-) A nice break in the everyday life here!

Até proxima!

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!!!