Oscar Rojas Castillo: Monitoring the invasive dinoflagellate Ceratium furcoides, its drivers, and consequences in the phytoplanktonic community of Marrecas a high altitude subtropical reservoir in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil.
Bichitra Paul: Characterisation of the cytokinin-mediated biocontrol activity of Chlamydomonas reinhardtii against Pseudomonas syringae in Tobacco and analysis of its potential as a bio-stimulant.
My Thesis in 3 minutes
My Thesis in 3 minutes
My Thesis in 3 minutes
Using a machine learning technology to recognize galápagos sea turtles. An image recognition algorithm in social media pictures to identify individuals, associate these individuals with locations and monitor their migration patterns in real time - Alban Emmanuel Mazars Simon
Oscar Rojas Castillo is an IMAE student from Guatemala. He is part of the 2017-2019 IMAE edition and he choose to continue at the University of Coimbra (UC) to work on his thesis project: Monitoring the invasive dinoflagellate Ceratium furcoides, its drivers, and consequences in the phytoplanktonic community of Marrecas a high altitude subtropical reservoir in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil.
Ceratium furcoides is an invasive species for South American freshwaters which blooms promote anoxic conditions threatening the local biota and decreasing the quality of the hydric resource. In 2013, C. furcoides was recorded for the first time in Marrecas, a water reservoir built to provide the city of Caxias do Sul in Brazil. It is of vital importance to understand the drivers of this dinoflagellate along with the consequences associated with the invader in the water reservoir and it’s planktonic community. Therefore, Data of the phytoplanktonic community and physicochemical parameters from 2014 till 2018 was analysed unveiling the physico-chemical and climatic drivers along with the planktonic interactions between the invader and the local community in this new environment.
​
Although Oscar is defending his thesis at UC, he had the opportunity to carry out her work at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil under the supervision of Professor Luciana De Souza Cardoso.
Mari Gigauri is an IMAE student from Georgia. She is part of the 2017-2019 IMAE edition and she choose to continue at the University of Coimbra (UC) to work on her thesis project: Use of waggle dances to study foraging locations of honey bees (Apis mellifera).
The aim of this work is to analyse if the honey bees use agricultural landscape in Burgos (Spain) to collect resources or they mostly forage at the wildflower resources. Moreover, to study if the temporal and spatial variation of resources in the landscape affects their foraging patterns. The waggle dance information was used as the main method of detecting the foraging locations used by the colony. Nectar, Pollen and in general Flower resource availability was also assessed at a landscape level, giving us the opportunity to find their distribution spatially.
​
Mari is defending her thesis at UC. She often collaborates with the B-team, a group of investigator from the Soil Ecology and Ecotoxicology Laboratory - Centre for Functional Ecology, which has the honey bee and another wild bees as study model.
Bichitra Paul is an IMAE student from Bangladesh. She is part of the 2017-2019 IMAE edition and she choose to continue at the University of Coimbra (UC) to work on her thesis project: Characterisation of the cytokinin mediated biocontrol activity of Chlamydomonas reinhardtii against Pseudomonas syringae in Tobacco.
​
The aim of the thesis is to prove that Microalgae which produce cytokinins can provide pathogen resistance to plants. This is done by comparing wild-type microalgae to its corresponding knockout mutants (which have certain genes of the cytokinin biosynthesis pathway deleted). The functional characterisation of this inter- organism phytohormone mediated interaction will help us understand the underlying molecular mechanism of this three way interaction between organisms.
​
Although Bichitra is defending her thesis at UC, she had the opportunity to carry out her work at the Molecular Plant Physiology and Phenomics laboratory at the Crop Sciences section in the University of Copenhagen, Denmark under the supervision of Dr. Thomas Georg Roitsch.