Month: September 2019

The European Researchers Night is an event coordinated by the European Commission aiming at bringing together researchers and society in cities around the world. The Granada 2019 edition took place on 27th September and involved over 500 researchers performing hands-on experiments and practical workshops. The aim is also to motivate young people to embark on research careers. The events promote how researchers contribute to our society by displaying their work in an interactive and engaging forum. Fundación MEDINA participated in the event with a workshop where people had the chance to learn the crucial role played by microbial natural products to combat infectious diseases, and the importance of R&D projects such as IIMENA to discover new antibiotics. Video of the event is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bioJelEdvHg&feature=youtu.be

Omkar Mohite won the Genes by MDPI poster prize at the 14th International Symposium on Genetics of Industrial Microorganisms (GIM 2019), held on 8-11 September 2019 in Pisa, Italy. He presented highlights of his work with Dr. Palsson and Dr. Weber on the pangenome analysis of enterobacteria for secondary metabolite gene clusters and their associated gene sets. This approach may provide a better understanding of the natural role of secondary metabolites and obtain clues for biotechnological optimizations for their production through the associated genes. Moreover, 4 more posters were presented at the GIM conference from the DTU's team from the IIMENA project: Charlotte Beck, Tue Jørgensen, Emilia Palazzotto and Yaojun Tong as well as two talks by Tilmann Weber and Kai Blin.

Omkar Mohite won the best poster presentation award at the DTU Bioustain annual seminar on 4-5 September 2019 in Copenhagen, Denmark. He is working on the pangenome analysis of a large number of genomes for secondary metabolism with Dr. Palsson and Dr. Weber in our iimena project. In this case, he revealed the potential of enterobacteria to produce diverse secondary metabolites and identifies their putatively associated genes from across the genome.