NGI participating in “Forskarfredag”

On September 27 we met with around 60 Swedish high school students and Renuka Kudva talked about how we can use modern sequencing technologies to explore the hidden microbial world around us.

Microorganisms outnumber human life. Yet, much of their lives and function remain unseen and waiting to be discovered. While there is a growing body of work on the human microbiome, there are few studies on microorganisms in the environment.

How does one study organisms that we don’t even know the existence of and therefore cannot culture in the lab? Next Generation Sequencing technologies aid discovery and the exploration of these creatures that live all around us.

We collaborated with Karin Garefelt and Leire Alonso Galicia, both researchers at KTH, who gave presentations about their research. Karin gave a glimpse of the life of a researcher collecting sea water samples on the research vessel Svea, and described how she is using various methods to explore the plankton communities in the seas around Sweden. Leire talked about how spatial transcriptomics is used to discover how defects in our DNA change how the cells behave and how this can give rise to diseases like cancer.

The afternoon was wrapped up with several tours of the NGI sequencing and spatial research imaging labs to show the cutting-edge technologies used to enable the amazing research done by all our NGI users. We were all very impressed by the genuine interest, curiosity and many interesting questions from the students and we are already looking forward to the next Forskarfredag!

Last Updated: 4th October 2024