March 2014 - Bent Petersen

Cebio Metagenomics Workshop 2014

Yesterday the workshop started and so far its really cool, full of amazing people. We started with a talk by David Holmes – Astrobiology: emerging opportunities for environmental microbiologists, followed up by Francisco Rodriguez-Valera – Postgenomic Microbiology and then we had a talk about the Brazilian Microbiome Project.

This morning of the second day we had a fantastic Bacterial Metagenomics mini-course by Carolina Megumi Mizuno, Rohit Ghai and Francisco Rodriguez-Valera.

After the course, it was time for my talk, and I think it went fantastic. I had students approaching me afterwards and there might be a few collaborations on the way. Plus, invitations to come back to Brzail to do some teaching and talk about projects, couldn’t be better 🙂

Last talk was from Ramy Aziz talking about Genes Without Borders: Mobile Genetic Elements in Genomes.

Good links from Ramy:
http://theseed.org – Home of the SEED
http://kbase.us – Take a look at the Iris section (IRIS – The web-based terminal to give you access to the full KBase command line.)
http://www.phantome.org – Phage annotation tool

: Rami selfie with two busy people

: Talking at #cebiongs2014

Wonderful Brazil

Last Wednesday I jumped into a planed heading for Belo Horizonte, Brazil. The reason is both business and pleasure – just as I like it. I have been invited to give a talk at a workshop organised by Cebio. The Title of the workshop is “Metagenomics Workshop – III International Workshop on Environmental Microbiology” – a link can be found here and the program is here. Also check out the invited speakers section here 😉

Before the workshop I spent two days in BH, where I among others visited the local market. To me it’s super fun to walk around and see all the different things you can buy, smell all the spices and amazing food – see all the things that are so different from Denmark…

Saturday morning I took a plane to Rio where I had a hotel very close to both Copacabana and Ipanema beach. Very nice location. The days passed with touring around, visited among others (of course) Christ the Redeemer and the botanical garden. All the amazing pictures are still at my camera, so you will have to deal with a few from my phone until I get to empty my camera 🙂

Tomorrow the workshop starts and I will of course write about that. In the meantime enjoy a few pictures from Beautiful Belo Horizonte and Rio De Janeiro.