September, back to school with Rafts4Biotech

We are not schoolkids anymore but lifelong learning is still our mindset at Rafts4Biotech. Thus, after a short summer break, we prepared a month full of training and dissemination activities to start off strong with our “school-year” and to foster knowledge exchange!

We started with our fourth General Assembly at the headquarters of CSIC in the heart of Madrid. During this meeting the consortium had the chance to share its results, discuss about its progress and collectively plan on the following activities of the project.

The R4B consortium at the 4th General Assembly.

After the GA and also in Madrid, but this time in the facilities of Fundación COTEC, we hosted our first R4B symposium: “Lipid Membrane Eukaryotic & Prokaryotic Biology”. This event counted with the participation of international experts in lipid biochemistry and membrane biology, R4B partners and young scientists working on these fields.

Thanks to the lectures of the six invited speakers and the R4B partners as well as the short talks and poster presentation of more than 25 PhD students and postdocs, the R4B Symposium became a successful platform for scientific exchange and discussion.

Invited speaker Ilya Levental from the University of Texas presenting his work at the R4B Symposium.

After this dose of exciting theory we moved to the practise! We had our first lab exchange within partner institutions with researches from Oscar Kuiper’s Lab at the Molecular Genetics Department from the University of Groningen visiting the laboratory from our project coordinator Daniel López at CNB for a short lab rotation.

R4B partners from CNB and RUG working together in Madrid.

As cherry on the cake for our training and dissemination month we launched our first video protocol to share what we do with the entire scientific community! In this short video available online everyone can learn how we isolate bacterial lipid rafts step by step!