BLUES joins COMBO meeting
One of the most important things to come out of a Horizon Europe project is knowledge exchange. There's something invaluable about cooperation between researchers and experts across countries, cultures, and languages, coming together to advance their field and ultimately, improve Europe and our societies. And we see this magic often in our project meetings or when meeting with fellow, similar projects and teams.
On this note, before the winter holidays last year, we were invited by our sister project COMBO to attend their meeting and present our work. On 18 December, our coordinator René H. Wijffels of Wageningen University & Research presented BLUES and outlined the project's objectives, introduced the consortium, and highlighted the specific areas of intersection between BLUES and COMBO. He talked about:
- How the BLUES partners bring a wealth of experience in sponge cell cultures (G. barretti), in addition to media formulations and diverse cell bank, and therefore, could support COMBO in establishing their cell culture methodologies
- How our colleague Prof. Torsten Thomas, an expert on the microbiome of sponges, could initiate a collaboration on the microbiome of sponge cells, particularly that of G. barretti
- How, given the significant overlap between BLUES and COMBO on research focused on G. barretti, both
project could benefit from
- analysing the compounds produced by the sponge (the so-called barettins)
- and the compound produced by the microbiome (barettides) of the sponge, in conjunction
We are happy to see this synergy gaining ground and we cannot wait to get in touch more with our colleagues at COMBO and explore all opportunities for cooperation. In the meantime, we invite you to check out their website to get an idea of their mission and the added value of their work: https://www.combo-eu.org/.