Great news! MetaFluidics has been selected to take part in the Science in the City Festival, a free event organised during ESOF 2018 inToulouse (France) from 7 to 15 July 2018.

The Science in the City Festival in a few words…

For the first time in France, after Copenhagen in 2014 and Manchester in 2016, Toulouse has been chosen to host this European biennale of Science (ESOF 2018). From 7 to 15 July 2018, the Science in the City Festival, an integral part of ESOF, will invest the city and its surroundings.and will be dedicated to the general public. As a free event, the Festival is aimed at people of all ages who are curious about science and innovation.

“Proteins with Superpowers”: an immersive experience offered by the MetaFluidics partners

“Proteins with Superpowers” is an immersive experience in which participants will go through an interactive, hands-on, simulated process of discovering microbes in nature, extracting their enzymes and putting them to industrial use. The proposed activity seeks to communicate to a younger audience the relevance of microorganisms, enzymes and industrial biotechnology for the welfare of our society.

The MetaFluidics team has planned two different activities according to age groups:

• Microbes with superpowers: an activity focused on microbes for children ages 6-13;
• Enzymes with superpowers: an activity focused on enzyme discovery and application for participants ages 14 and above.

The proposed workshop will be complementary with the scientific session “Going to Extremes” also proposed by the MetaFluidics team during ESOF 2018.

We look forward to meeting you in Toulouse in July 2018. Save the date and stay tuned for more information soon!

On Friday 25 November, MetaFluidics partner Novozymes organised a very enriching internal R&D meeting in Bagsværd, Denmark. The MetaFluidics poster was especially successful and attracted many listeners !!

From left to right: Martin, Ali, Keith & Michael from Novozymes standing next to the MetaFluidics kakemono & poster

Great news! MetaFluidics has been selected to take part in ESOF 2018, that will be held in Toulouse, France from 9 to 14 July 2018.

The EuroScience Open Forum (ESOF) is a biennial interdisciplinary general science meeting and the highlight of the European science calendar.

The MetaFluidics scientific session will plunge into the fascinating world of extremophiles by covering various extreme environment such as hot springs, Arctic/Antarctic, salterns, acidic rivers, deserts, etc. 

ESOF 2018 is constructed around the motto “Sharing science: towards new horizons”, which means bridging barriers between disciplines, communities and countries, making a link between generations, encouraging and welcoming citizen aspirations and initiatives, and being the anchor of a knowledge based society.

Sessions will focus on current and future path-breaking science and its ways of producing and sharing knowledge and innovation. ESOF includes all disciplines, including arts, social sciences and humanities, as well as physical and life sciences, engineering and medicine.

For more information: https://www.esof.eu/en/calls/scientific-programme.html

More news soon!

On October 13, 2017, Metafluidics was awarded the Madri+d prize for the most innovative EU project in Madrid.

The madri+d prizes are an initiative from the Comunidad de Madrid, which, through the madri+d Foundation, aims to acknowledge researchers and business people in the Madrid region. It promotes high-technology business creation and successful knowledge transfer, as well as encourages international cooperation and scientific result communication by research teams around Madrid.

The jury awarded the “madri+d prize of Best European Project in Cooperation” to the MetaFluidics team, coordinated by Dr. Aurelio Hidalgo Huertas from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. The prize recognizes the ability of the consortium to carry out such a large-scale project as part of the Industrial Leadership pillar of the European Horizon 2020 programme, with large industrial involvement and various fields of application. The prize rewards MetaFluidics with €10,000 and a €5,000-worth patentability analysis of the project’s results by PONS Intellectual Property.

This prize is a huge achievement for the MetaFluidics consortium and represents invaluable support for the project!!

Congratulations to all the MetaFluidics team!

For more information (in Spanish):
http://www.madrimasd.org/notiweb/noticias/los-xii-premios-madrid-galardonan-los-proyectos-mas-innovadores-comunidad-madrid

The second MetaFluidics bioinformatics workshop took place in Aarhus on 18^th and 19^th September 2017, organized and moderated by Work Package Leader Dr. Michael Lappe, Senior Bioinformatics Scientist at QIAGEN Aarhus (Denmark). Within this forum, the 11 participants shared their views and experiences, sharing the results obtained after 12 months of this very exciting four-year interdisciplinary and intersectoral cooperation.

Fruitful discussions  

This advanced workshop focused on obtaining an overview of state-of-the-art tools in metagenomic NGS data analysis. The main objective was to provide an interactive forum open to both consortium members and associated bioinformaticians. Within this forum, participants identified main bottlenecks, collected suggestions for alternative implementations to currently used methods and discussed possible ideas for further improvements. With bioinformatics being a key enabling technology in the metagenomics field in the near future, the findings and resulting requirement specifications will influence software development within MetaFluidics to serve the research community for the remainder of the project.

The discussions covered a wide range of current topics such as de-novo enzyme discovery, microbial genome annotation, structure-function relationships, biosynthetic pathways and meta-transcriptomics. In summary, the workshop provided a very stimulating experience with discussions on relevant issues, opening up potential further collaborations. All participants contributed insights, shared experiences from different perspectives and exchanged useful hints, tips and links.

For more information, please contact us at info@metafluidics.eu

Projects Metafluidics and Carbazymes organized an International Workshop on extremophile research in Alicante.

International experts on extremophilic microorganism research came together between 26th and 29th June to teach in the Workshop “Technical approaches to the study of extremophiles”.

Hosted at the University of Alicante and directed by Prof. Pepa Antón, the course was coorganized by the Spanish Network for Extremophiles and the research projects “MetaFluidics” and “CarbaZymes”, both funded by the European Commission.  During the workshop, 34 students from 5 different countries had the chance to learn from the experts and get hands-on experience in handling and analyzing these peculiar microbes.

Dr. Aurelio Hidalgo and Pr. Pepa Antón, co-organizers of the workshop

The program, which included theory and practice, included instruction by renowned experts such as Francisco J.M Mojica, discoverer of  CRISPR systems , CSIC scientists Mª Asunción de los Ríos, Jacek Wierzchos and Juan Miguel González, Aurelio Hidalgo (Coordinator of Project MetaFluidics),” and  several microbiology professors from Autónoma of Madrid, Granada, Sevilla, Helsinki or Warwick universities, Helsinki.

What are extremophile microorganisms?

Extreme environments are locations with a temperature, acidity, salinity, pressure or radiation levels that are hostile to life, from an anthropocentric point of view.  Organisms that dwell in such environments are called extremophiles and they have adapted perfectly to function under such conditions.  The interest in the study of extremophiles lies in a better understanding of evolution and the origin of life on Earth, as well as the possibility of life in other planets.   Additionally, these microorganisms are coveted for industrial applications due to the extreme resistance and tolerance of their proteins.  In this workshop, the most current techniques were presented, from biochemical characterization of enzymes to the analysis of the microbial communities that live in these extreme environments.

For more information or interviews, please contact us at: info@metafluidics.eu

The group of international students, together with their supervisors.

After a full year of very fruitful work, the whole MetaFluidics consortium gathered in Madrid on June 12-13, 2017 to assess progress, share results and plan the next actions.

The first-year progress meeting of the MetaFluidics project was held in Madrid on June 12-13, 2017, organized and moderated by Project Coordinator Dr. Aurelio Hidalgo, Principal Investigator at the Universidad Autónoma of Madrid (Spain). In total, over 40 participants from the 13 partners attended the progress meeting, sharing the results obtained after 12 months of this very exciting four-year interdisciplinary and intersectoral cooperation.

Coordinated by the Universidad Autónoma of Madrid (UAM), MetaFluidics includes the participation of 5 companies, 5 universities and 3 research organizations from Denmark, Spain, France, Norway, Portugal and the United Kingdom. This project is funded with more than € 8.8 million by Horizon 2020, the European Union’s Research and Innovation Programme, under the Industrial Leadership call and the topic “Metagenomics as an innovation driver”.

The objective of this collaborative research is to integrate a range of technologies into a user-friendly platform to identify genes of biotechnological interest.

First Hits and Publications

Thanks to very successful collaborations, DNA samples from natural environments all over the world have been collected and the first hits have been discovered in this natural diversity. New screening technology is being developed, such as the one described in the first publication of the project, entitled “Are in vivo selections on the path to extinction?”. The article was published in Microbial Biotechnology and elaborates on how droplet microfluidics will become a disruptive technology in the next few years.

MetaFluidics in major events

Over the past 12 months, MetaFluidics partners have participated in several major international events including Functional Metagenomics 2016 (Inderøy, Norway), BioProsp 2017 (Tromsø, Norway), CBM 12 (Vienna, Austria) and AbSciCon 2017 (Mesa, AZ, US). The next event on the agenda is FEMS 2017 (7th Congress of European Microbiologists), held in Valencia, Spain.

The MetaFluidics consortium was also represented at the KET Biotech workshop organized by the European Commission (Brussels, Belgium) and partners organized three very exciting workshops: the Bioinformatics Training for experimentalists (Aarhus, Denmark), the EMBL Course “Microbial Metagenomics: A 360° Approach” (Heidelberg, Germany) and “Technical approaches to the study of extremophiles” (Alicante, Spain).

For more information on the MetaFluidics project and its activities, please check our website: www.metafluidics.eu or contact us at info@metafluidics.eu.

MetaFluidics is also on social media:

• Twitter : @MetaFluidics_EU
• Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/MetaFluidics_EU-335684966791474/
• LinkedIn : https://www.linkedin.com/groups/10325253/profile

The bioinformatics workshop for experimentalists was held at QIAGEN Aarhus from Monday 21^st to Wednesday 23^rd November 2016. The 14 participants were trained on the effective use of the central server for sharing data within the consortium and performing data analysis tasks with user-friendly bioinformatics tools through a mixture of lectures, tutorials and hands-on experience in an interactive setting.

Day 1:

The first part of the workshop focused on technical aspects of the server architecture and provided help with completing the software installations of the current Genomics Workbench (GxWB 9.5.2), the latest build of the Microbial Genomics Module (MGM 1.99 beta) and the server-client plugin.

Day 2:

The 2nd day of workshop started with lectures on taxonomic profiling, read-mapping and de-novo assembly of NGS reads, followed by a session covering the Genome finishing module to help with the assembly of contigs. The afternoon provided an overview of the different aspects of the Microbial Genomics Module and concluded with a hands-on session where participants could go through the provided tutorials at their own pace. Experts from QIAAR were around to help out with any questions arising.

Day 3:

The last day of the workshop continued with the hands-on tutorials in an informal and interactive setting, followed by a session on visualisation aspects of biological datasets in general and biological (i.e. metabolic) networks in particular. The workshop concluded with a feedback session, conducted in the style of an agile retrospective by QIAARs user-experience (UX) expert, assisted by the MGM product owner, support and project manager.

On 15-16 November 2016, Project coordinator Dr. Aurelio Hidalgo and Dr. Michael Lappe fom partner QIAGEN Aarhus were honoured to take part in the European Commission’s second Workshop on “Maximising the Impact of KET Biotechnology”.

In line with the goals of Open Innovation, Open Science and Open to the World, the workshop gathered a range of academic and industrial project beneficiaries representing 21 KET Biotechnology projects funded through Horizon 2020, representatives from the European Association for Bio-industries (EuropaBio) and the European Federation of Biotechnology (EFB), delegates from jurisdictions leading in biotechnology (USA, China, Korea and Japan), an expert on standardisation in synthetic biology, representatives of the Bio-based Industries’ Joint Undertaking and representatives of the European Commission.

Discussions focused on ongoing European research and innovation biotechnology projects and their future added value, thereby providing an opportunity for project partners to show actual and potential progress towards expected impacts, as well as a diversity of scientific, industrial and market difficulties and challenges in modern biotechnology.

Dr. Hidalgo and Dr. Lappe presented the objectives of the MetaFluidics project and how we propose to overcome a number of current bottlenecks through innovative metagenomics technologies.

For more information: https://bookshop.europa.eu/en/maximising-the-impact-of-ket-biotechnology-pbKI0516025/

The Functional Metagenomics 2016 conference took place in Inderøy, Norway, on September 25-28, 2016, with the participation of several MetaFluidics partners. This was the 2nd open conference of ‘Functional Metagenomics International’, which was formed in 2011 and consists of a growing number of researchers around the globe sharing the interest in studying environmental metagenomes based on encoded functions and in developing efficient tools to exploit these using function-based approaches.

The Conference brought together interested researchers working in the field of Functional Metagenomics for three intense days of scientific presentations, as well as vivid discussions leading to exchange of knowledge and latest research results, in the inspiring surrounding of Mid-Norwegian nature. The informal setting and small format of the conference, as well as the participation of world leading researchers within the field ensure high quality, in-depth scientific discussions both in the plenum, in extended breaks and at social functions.

The great and positive response to our invitation indicates the increasing relevance of metagenomics research in functionally describing microbial biodiversity on earth and targeting its exploitation towards new products for a wide variety of applications for the benefits of society and to contribute to solving some of the key societal challenges of our time.

For more information on the Functional Metagenomics 2016 conference, please visit the conference website: http://www.sintef.no/fmg2016