Gödöllő

Last week, Dušan, Zoran and Aleš spent four pleasant days in Hungary visiting Dr. Ákos Horváth and his team working at the Department of Aquaculture, Szent István University in Gödöllő. The visit was made in a frame of Slovene-Hungarian bilateral project "Cryopreservation of sperm and establishment of a cryobank of the Adriatic grayling (Thymallus thymallus) from the Soča river".

Besides doing some cryo-lab work, we also took this opportunity to sample three locations in Bükki Nemzeti Park, supposedly inhabited by native brown trout populations (genetic testing underway). We also visited Lillafüred trout breeding farm close to Miskolc run by Mr. György Hoitsy. Here we ate an excellent cat-fish goulash with baked pasta and white cheese cooked by his wife.

On the last day of our visit, the Hungarian colleagues along with Dr. Zoran Spirkovski from Hydro Biological Institute (Ohrid, Macedonia) presented their initiative for organizing the 2nd Conference for Conservation & Management of Balkan Freshwater Fishes (COMBAFF), which should be held in September 2010 in Hungary. Aleš was invited to participate in scientific committee... OK, he couldn't say no.

LIFFe 2009

LIFFe stands for Ljubljana International Film Festival. To be honest, most people still refer to the festival as LIFF (especially those who are aware of the meaning of liff). As mentioned last year, BTRG selects a movie with a fish related title. There were 5 movies to choose from this year, last year's winner was Encounters at the End of the World, this year it was Fish Tank. There is hardly a place for fish in an English social drama, but several things were unexpectedly connected to our work. For instance, there actually was a fishing scene and a memorable "fish are stupid" quote. The main actor was Michael Fassbender, who also played in Inglourious Basterds, last movie we saw as a part of team building. And of course, the main music theme was Bobby Womack's version of California dreamin', a very appropriate song just 2 months before Urška and Aleš will represent BTRG at the Plant and genome conference on a winter's day in the same state.
Anyway, Tamara, Urška and Andrej attended this year's LIFFe event, along with Daliborka and her team as special guest stars. Anja and Aleš were absent at the last minute notice due to emergency sampling expedition. In the boss's absence there was enough time for conversation and some gossiping after the movie (until the waitress kicked us out).

Spring

Meteorological spring started on 1st of March, astronomical on 20th of March. At the Dept. of Animal Science, 2 events mark the begining of spring.

LIFFE

LIFFE stands for Ljubljana International Film Festival. Four years ago we were checking the programme and saw a movie with a very fish related title. So members of the BTRG went to see Fickende Fische (Do Fish Do It?). The idea was good and worth repeating. The following year we waited too long to get the tickets so we went to see a movie with absolutely no fish related subject, Les Poupées russes (The Russian Dolls). Last year it was Sonhos de Peixe (Fish Dreams) and this year we selected a documentary Encounters at the End of the World.

4 core members of the BTRG went to see the movie plus 1 special guest star, we also met 2 former co-workers in the cinema. About the movie shot in Antarctica.... It is not a "fluffy penguin movie", more a series of interviews with "professional travellers and occasional workers", and weirdo scientists. We now understand a little bit better what people we meet on field trips think about us and our work.

Picnic

Chair of Genetics, Animal Biotechnology and Immunology (where most of the balkan-trout team works) organized the second annual picnic. There was a lot of things to celebrate: the end of the school year, Tamara's PhD, Peter's birthday and good grades received by the entire research group.

More pictures available here.

New PhD

Tamara Rozman successfully defended her PhD thesis "Characterization of transferrin locus and its application in phylogenetic analysis of genus Salmo", available here. Transferrin was the marker of choice because mitochondrial markers and microsatellites (frequently used nuclear markers) have several limitations when used in phylogenetic studies. A major problem was ancient tetraploidization of salmonid genome resulting in two actively transcribed transferrin loci.

Tamara was involved in this project for a long time, partially because of this and this reason, and also because the study was carried out on third generation of marble trout × brown trout hybrids (generation time 2-3 years).

Young researchers

Public Tender for Early Stage Research Candidates for the Year 2008 is out (available in Slovenian and English). Those who are interested can join our group under the mentorship of Simona Sušnik.

Criteria in details and how to apply are here, briefly:

• Bachelors degree and average grade >8.00 or
  
• Completed second degree according to the Bologna process and average >8.00 or
  
• Masters degree of science
  
• Maximal age 28 years (born 1980 or after)
  

Duration of founding:

• 4.5 years (for 4 year doctoral study course)
  
• 3.5 years (for third level study according to the Bologna process)
  

A new piece of equipment II

As mentioned, a younger and better looking model appeared to present the wonderful new ABI3130xl.

Bilateral cooperation

Saša of the University of Belgrade has joined us in the laboratory for 2 weeks. He is a regular participant at sampling field trips and is the author or coauthor of several papers, mostly on the subject of salmonids of Serbia. His visit was made possible by a bilateral agreement between Slovenia and Serbia promoting scientific cooperation. We got a 2 year grant for our fish project and now we have to spend the money. These two weeks were very busy, he analysed a ton of samples, but we did find some time to enjoy the winter sun.

Update during Carneval season

Our site has some new pages. We have added information for potential undergraduate and PhD students that would like to join us. Most photos on our site is from sampling expeditions, therefore a lot of photos from laboratories and offices of our department were added to the new pages to show a more realistic view of our everyday work.



During the 2000th visitor party (see previous post) we had a lot of great ideas, some of them have now materialised. Services (genotyping of trout and grayling), some marble trout updates and photos from Zeta field trip. Several pages are now available in both English and Slovenian.

Party

BTRG celebrated the 2000th visitor of our website in a Bosnian restaurant. Special guest star was of course David, the designer of www.balkan-trout.com. Frequent site visitors already know his lovely wife Tamara.

A new piece of equipment