AMRI Research Exchange: A ferry to Finland

AMRI researcher and PhD student at Uppsala University Xavi Florenza García in the research group of Stefan Bertilsson (SLU, AMRI Lead PI). Throughout his PhD, Xavi has largely worked on developing and testing methods to target mixotrophic flagellates at individual resolution. This week, Xavi sat down to answer some questions about his AMRI Research Exchange to the University of Turkku in Finland.

Your AMRI research exchange: where did you go, for how long?

I was visiting Manu Tamminen, a collaborator of ours at the University of Turku for a week.

What was the main purpose of your exchange?

The idea was to discuss and set the scope and backbone of a manuscript that will describe the results we’ve collected so far on how the epicPCR workflow performs when aimed at recovering the associations between unicellular eukaryotes and their physically attached bacterial cohort via 18S-16S linkage at individual resolution.

What did you find to be the most valuable element of your exchange?

The chance to discuss in person. It allowed more fluid, more spontaneous discussions that ended up in unexpected avenues for the focus of our manuscript.

How will your research exchange help you in moving forward with your studies?

It has been critical to establish the way in which negative results obtained during my PhD, usually hard to deal with, can be featured and discussed in my dissertation. Not only that, I hope these results can also be useful for other researchers interested in implementing similar workflows in the future.

What was the research exchange application process like?
Smooth, simple, fast. Couldn’t be easier.

Are you interested in applying for an AMRI research exchange? Reach more and apply here! Want to talk more with Xavi about his research? Email caliac@lnu.se to get in touch!