Adventures in Rio de Janeiro's lagoons!

After a year from getting the FAPERJ's grant to perform a 16S metagenomics in water samples from the north area of Rio's lagoons, we finally started!

Besides the privilege to lead this project with Leandro under the guidance from the legend Franscisco Esteves, this work has brought me way more than amazing people.

The ecosystem of this study is called Restinga, and encompasses dozens of lagoons that possess completely different physical and chemical properties (and they are really pretty!). We wondered how microbial life could have adapted in such different conditions, and how their interactions with the environment shape this system.

During the last two weeks, a group of several students, postdocs, professors and technicians have joined us, with the aim of collecting and filtering water samples and extracting their DNA, from 79 samples (plus duplicates and blanks) coming from 23 different lagoons. They were amazing, and we all learned a lot and had fun doing great science together!

Now it's time to move forward to PCR and library prep for sequencing, which will be posted here in the upcoming weeks!