iBB

Sandra Silva defended her PhD thesis in Biotechnology and Biosciences at Instituto Superior Técnico, receiving the highest mentioning “Distinction and Honour”.  Her thesis entitled “Secondary metabolite biosynthesis by Aquimarina species: emerging properties and bioactivities from the rare marine biosphere” was developed under the supervision of Rodrigo Costa and Tina Keller-Costa from iBB and DBE. During the past four years, Sandra combined genomics, experimental microbiology, metabolomics, and analytical chemistry to explore marine host-associated bacteria as a source of novel natural products with antimicrobial activities.

Metagenomics is an expanding field within microbiology and related disciplines. The number of metagenomes deposited in public databases is exponentially rising, but data mining and interpretation can be challenging due to mis-annotated metadata entries. The new Marine Metagenome Metadata Database (MarineMetagenomeDB) helps researchers to identify marine metagenomes of interest for re-analysis and meta-analysis and is a valuable resource for non-bioinformaticians to find marine metagenome samples with curated metadata. The study, published in Environmental Microbiome, was led by Dr Ulisses Nunes da Rocha and team from the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (Germany), and counted on specialist guidance in marine metadata standardization from iBB/DBE PhD-student Sandra Silva and researchers Tina Keller-Costa and Rodrigo Costa. The user-friendly web app is publicly available at here.