Short term scientific mission of Zala at Helmholtz Zentrum Munich

My name is Zala Prevorsek and I am a postdoctoral researcher at Biotechnical faculty, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. I am currently working on a microbial project, which is focused on finding novel genes related to polymer degradation and methane production in complex microbial communities and their overlap with mRNA transcripts. Thanks to the support of METHAGENE COST Action, I went for an STSM to Schloter, Helmholtz Zentrum München German Research Center for Environmental Health (GmbH), Neuherberg (DE), from February 1^st untill March 2^nd 2015.

The goal of the STSM is to identify and record the metatranscriptome of the realistic microbial communities in the gastrointestinal tract of five species of Slovenian alpine ruminants (roebuck, deer, mouflon, capricorn, chamois) that are characterized by high efficiency in using a variety of plant polymers, to assess their intertemporal connectivity and dependence on the type of plant polymers and their degradation products, focused on methane production.

Week 1:
I arrived to Munich, Germany, on February 1^st 2015. I brought the rumen samples with me, stored on dry ice, along with all necessary molecular kits, chemicals and extraction platforms. On 2^nd of February I started working in the lab of Research Unit for Environmental Genomics, Helmholtz Zentrum Munich. During my first 7 days here, I preformed DNA and RNA co-extraction from rumen samples of chamois, deer, roe deer and mouflon. Despite low RNA purity, possibly due to the composition of the rumen samples, I synthesized the cDNA by performing the reverse transcription PCR for samples of four animal species and I was successful, so now I can continue as planned.

Week 2:
Today is the end of my second week in Munich, one half of my STSM is through. It hasn´t been easy for me, during the last 14 days, I have to admit. I left 2 small kinds at home, had to cope with this enormous unknown city of Munich, tried not to get lost in this big microbial laboratory…. This was quite stressful at the beginning. But despite that, I am happy I decided to come here. I left my comfort zone and that is where the life starts, they say, at the end of it. In the last 2 weeks I learned a lot of new things and met a bunch of really nice people from all over the world. I expect to learn even more in the next 2 weeks, now that my cDNA is ready and the metagenomics sequence analysis is one step closer. I hope I get some good results ☺.

Kind regards from Munich, Zala.
For more information, please contact me at Zala.Prevorsek@bf.uni-lj.si.