Workshop 2 and Advance Training Course 2 were held between the 17th and 19th January, hosted by the University of Frankfurt.
The meeting was attended by the Fellows, the project’s Principal Investigators, and the Advisory Board members of Francesco Sole and Ritva Tikkanen. A Representative of the Partner Organisation LifeGlimmer (Edoardo Saccenti) also attended.
During the workshop sessions, fellows and the advisory board members presented their work to the meeting.
A report on the meeting was submitted by the fellows Islam Alshamleh, Alan Cunningham and Aysegul Erdem:
“For our second ITN workshop we were warmly welcomed to the JW Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main by the Schwalbe and Serve labs. This meeting provided the fellows a greater opportunity to present our progress to date and was very informative in terms of the scientific talks given by the professors, the invited speakers and the fellows. What we all found very useful were the deep discussions and the scientific input on the fellows’ projects, due to the longer discussion time allocated to each project in this workshop. From the presentations it was clear that good progress had been made within the first year of the fellows projects with more exciting plans to follow. Our supervisors were also interested in the development of our academic skills by giving the chance to the fellows to chair different sessions of the workshop. Islam and Aysegul chaired some sessions in the second day of the workshop.
We also had a traditional German meal at restaurant ‘Apfelwein Wagner’. Local delicacies such as “Handkäs mit Musik”, groene sauce and apfelwein were enjoyed by all. We greatly look forward to hosting our next summer school in Groningen in July!!”
For the Advance Training Course, Dr. Tobias Berg provided an insightful lecture about the clinical presentation and diagnosis of acute and chronic leukaemias.
Further ATC topics were provided by Professors Schwalbe (Drug Discovery); Schuringa (Metabolism in stem cells and in cancer); Günther (Metabolic Flux analyses by NMR); and Cascante (Metabolic Flux analyses by MS). Lectures were also given by Dr. Frank Schnuetgen and Professor Edoardo Saccenti, which looked at genetic technologies such as CRISPR-CAS9 and various aspects of systems biology in metabolomic modelling.
Tour to the NMR facility in GUF:
Frankfurt has one of the biggest NMR facilities in the world. During the meeting in Frankfurt, Islam Alshamleh took the fellows for a guided tour in the facility, where they could see the spectrometers’ hardware and equipment. Such a tour was helpful to familiarise everyone with NMR, since not all partners in this research consortium carry on NMR-based metabolomics research.
The agenda is attached here, as well as images taken at the meeting below.
