Transformation in Barcelona: Sara’s placement report
This spring we were lucky enough to get additional funding from UKRI to enable some of our researchers to go on placements to different work environments to learn skills and build relationships. We’ll be sharing report from all of the placements.
Our second post is from Sara Franco Ortega. Sara is a member of the Ralstonia Phage project team, based at the University of York. Sara visited CRAG (Centre for Research in Agricultural Genomics) in Barcelona (Spain) where she was hosted by Marc Valls’ research group and supported by postdoc Merce Rocafort. Sara spent two weeks there with a focus on using natural transformation to obtain fluorescent strains of the bacterium Ralstonia solanacearum. Transformation is a natural process which allows bacteria to exchange genetic information. She made the video below to document the procedure she learned. Having fluorescent strains will help the project team to visualise bacteria inside the plant and understand differences between different strains.