Bram, our SmartAge ESR13, started his secondment at QIAGEN in Hilden late February.
Our SmartAge Partner organization QIAGEN has its own R&D group which supports scientists with workflows, webinars and numerous products for microbiome analysis. Our contact person at QIAGEN, Dominic O'Neill joined the QIAGEN R&D group in Hilden in 2011 as a Senior Scientist to work on solutions for next-generation sequencing. He is now the Director R&D for Microbiome Product Development.
Bram worked with the team of Dominic O’Neill to gain a better understanding of DNA extraction and sequencing. Most of the work was carried out under the supervision of Lisa Mahler, a scientist in Dominic’s team. Bram learned and performed different methods of DNA extraction and purification and various methods of DNA quantification and quality control. Subsequently, he learned about different sequencing techniques such as Illumina and Nanopore and assisted in the library preparation and sequencing of soil samples on a Nanopore machine. Besides the laboratory techniques, Bram was also introduced to the processing of sequenced data in the CLC workbench developed by QIAGEN. Here he learned methods to apply to both mRNA and DNA sequences and perform various analyses on them. Lastly he introduced to the team at QIAGEN to metabolic modelling and applied that on some of the sequenced data to provide insights and visualisations.
Besides work, Bram also enjoyed the various parks in Düsseldorf and took a trip to visit the city of Köln.