The end of May and June were busy to Beatriz, the EPIBOOST MSc student developing research with marine copepods (Acartia tonsa) to understand the effects of cadmium in DNA methylation, gene expression, oxidative stress, DNA damage and behaviour. Beatriz was with our advanced partners at UGent for five weeks. She learned on how to efficiently culture and synchronize copepods for testing, developed great skills in handling these tiny and rapid organisms. More than 1000 organisms were needed to complete the experiment generating samples for all downstream protocols according to our previous optimization steps. And the experiment was successfully carried out after many hours of intense work. Beatriz has now many records to analyse, samples to work with, Comets to visualize and score (the UAVR coordinator, Joana Pereira, traveled to Ghent to support the implementation of the Comet assay therein with Beatriz after getting herself trained by the EPIBOOSTER Joana Lourenço) and an anxious waiting period until seeing the whole methylome and whole transcriptome sequences to inspect!
A huge acknowledgement is due to the whole team at UGent, but specially to Illias Semmouri, Jana Asselman, João Barbosa and Jolien Depecker. Without you none of this would be possible, and because of your enormous close support to Beatriz, she will rock in her Thesis!
Good luck and thank you for the hard work Beatriz!
Leave a Reply