That would be the summary of what we experienced during our Secondment in Eyal Gottlieb’s lab at the Rappaport Faculty of Medicine and Research Institute, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. As part of our PhD formation, we cannot be happier to have had the privilege of being welcome by Prof. Eyal’s crew and being able to profit from a state-of-art metabolomics, which is a keystone technique performed and day-to-day improved by this specialized lab team at the department of Cell Biology and Cancer Science of the faculty.
Apart of the pleasure of learning new techniques and how to analyze some megabites of metabolomics data, sharing the lab routine with our Meta-Can colleagues was more than satisfying and full of support. Getting use to different cell culture room, pipettes, ways of doing more conventional techniques and working dynamic have made us more open and independent researchers. One of the most important aspects of this Secondment apart of the benefit of the mass spectrometry per se is the different points of view and advices that we received from Prof. Gottlieb and the lab group about our projects. Considering that every lab team is specialized in particular fields, getting a critical as well as deep input from researchers more involved in metabolism has broadened the spectrum of our research projects in order to better understand the essential crosstalk between immunology and metabolism.
Living in Haifa for three or four months was full of new events as well as dealing with the basic routine of life. To be in the center of such a multi-religious country, with different traditions everywhere and amazing landscapes and food was more than exciting. We spent the hot Israeli summer in the lab but also visiting holy places, beaches like the Death Sea and different cities such as Jerusalem, Acre and Nazareth. The adventure was extended to Petra and the desert in Jordan. All this was accompanied with excellent kebab, shawarma and Arabic coffee.
We are extremely grateful for this professional and personal opportunity. We sincerely thank Professor Gottlieb for being such a great and committed person who supported our research projects with the best quality way of thinking. We really thank Ms. Ifat Abramovich for sharing her astonishing expertise in the field and for letting us learn all the technicalities of doing metabolomics on an every day basis. In addition, we were really lucky having Ms. Bella Agranovich around for all her help and patience required for running our samples in the mass spectrometer. Our acknowledgments are extended to the lab manager Dr. Inbal Mor for supporting our beginning in the lab and progress. We thank our great PhD ESRs and friends, Jonatan Fernandez García and Sara I. Fernandes for being there for research and adventure.
We are just waiting for other ESRs coming to C3M, INSERM U1065 in Nice, France to contribute to their great experience of doing a Secondment in our lab. Waiting for you guys!!!
Manuel & Adriana
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 766214.