During the 3 years of the project the consortium have made great efforts to implement the project activities planned in the Action despite the fact that unforseen risks have occured during the two reporting periods:
- During the first reporting period (RP1), the majority of activities planned in the action were accomplished, but regarding the covid crisis, many of them were performed remotely.
After the KoM (M1), the MICAfrica consortium organized many conferences. The first one was organized in March 2021 in the frame of WP1 and has been a considerable contribution to the theoretical training of young researchers of USFAX in metagenomics. As a part of WP2 a second conference on “Microbiota-Host Interplay” was organized on May 2021 to initiate ER and ESR from USFAX to functional metagenomics.
Many online meetings and webinars were also organized in the frame of WP1 dealing the Linux operating system in metagenomic analysis. They were followed by a lab course during 4 days at USFAX with the participation of 23 ESR, ER and technicians who were trained in the metagenomic approach, since sampling to sequencing by NGS.
Internships in the IHUMI involving 4 ESRs and 8 ERs were then performed in order to initiate them to bioinformatic tools (Spades, Blastn,Prokka, etc...)
- During RP2, the consortium implemented the expected activities and those related to RP1 whish have been postponed regarding the covid crisis. Thus, a workshop on functional metagenomics has been organised at USFAX in April 2022 (M16); it was followed by intrneships involving ERs and ESRs from USFAX at INRAE and UNIFI (M17-M22) to be trained in functional metagfenomics, culturomics and metabolomics. Also two conferences for dissemination have been organised at USFAX on 2022 and 2023. The scientific activity has also focused on research and publication of scientifi articles.
The main activity during RP2 was the creation in collaboration with NA partners of the NACHM during a meeting organised at USFAX in July 2022 (M19); during this meeting a consortium agreement has been prepared, validated and signed and an action plan has been prepared. After that, USFAX coordinated the implementation of three workshops at NA coutries (Morocco, Algeria and Egypt) and many online meetings to assess the progress of the NA database development whish has been the main objective of the creation of NACHM (M25-M34).
Many communication and dissemination activities were performed using different tools of communication to promote the project outcomes and to raise the awareness of the general public of the importance of the microbiome-based personalized medicine.
