Currently, we are preparing 4 papers within the REPARES project. These papers are based on the short secondments carried out by junior researchers and on the work done during Seminar 1 on PCR methodology.
Two short research visits from UCT were organized in the first period of the REPARES project. Aleksandra Milobedzka did her short research visit at UCP with prof. Célia M. Manaia and Dana Vejmelkova did her short research visit at Wetsus. These visits, even though taking place largely during the first period of COVID-19-related restrictions, will fruit in at least two joined papers and for Dana Vejmelkova started further cooperation that continued by virtual soft-skills training as she until now participates in Wetsus team meetings and performs further research.
In the first reporting period, one seminar was organized - Seminar 1 - Impact of DNA Extraction on DNA Quality and Molecular Analytical Outputs was organized at TU Delft (in M4, January 2020). By the time of writing this periodic report, Seminars 3 and 4 were already organized by UCT in January 2021.
Organizing the shadowing visits has been challenging under the COVID-19 restrictions. However, Dana Vejmelkova is currently undergoing online soft-skills training as she participates once or twice a week at the video meetings of the Wetsus team. Similar online training is currently being organized for Sabina Purkrtova (UCT) at TUD.
Summer school on transferable skills was partially organized in November 2020 (M14). Since it needed to be online due to COVID-19, only half of the seminar was done in November and the second half was done in April 2021 (M19).
So far, two international research projects were submitted within the consortium: project WISE@ARC within the framework of JPI Aquatic pollutants and project CHEMBIOSE within the framework of European Green Deal H2020 RIA LC-GD-8-2-2020 (TUD, UW, UCP, and UCT involved, submitted on January 26, 2021). The submission of these projects was already an intensive training of UCT’s researchers involved (mainly Jan Bartacek and Sabina Purkrtová) in project submission. Still, a dedicated workshop on proposal submission is planned for August 2021.
During Seminar 1, one company participated (Future Genomics Technologies, Leiden, Netherlands) by giving a lecture. In joined seminars 3 and 4 (that took place in January 2021), again one non-academic institution (NIPH CZ - National Institute for Health Protection) was actively involved through lecturing.
We performed the first phase of an inter-laboratory study based on standard methodology established within the consortium at a joint workshop in December 2019 (M3) in Porto. The second phase of the study is currently being planned and its outcome will be a standard methodology for ARG’s detection in wastewater.
The online database embedded in the MiDAS platform has been established and put into operation by a joint effort of UCT and AAU see
https://midas.programming.cool/guide/antibiotic-resistance(se abrirá en una nueva ventana).
The promoting activities (open summer school, papers publishing, operation, and promotion of the database) are mainly planned for the second part of the project. But we already established the web-based platform (
https://repares.vscht.cz/(se abrirá en una nueva ventana)) and we produced two newsletters where we actively inform about new ARG-related events and researches taking place. We also published 1 educational YouTube video in Czech and English mutations (
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNkFASNumnK-wSxtwkgN0Mw(se abrirá en una nueva ventana))
