PhD student Joana Couceiro from iBB/DBE won the Best Poster Award in the ‘Earth Systems: Oceans to Near Space’ category at the MIT Portugal Annual Conference held on November 8th, 2024, in Coimbra. The poster, titled “Community Structure, Bioactivities, and Secondary Metabolite Production of Bacteria Associated with a Temperate Octocoral” highlights recent efforts in cultivating bacteria associated with the coral Leptogorgia sarmentosa, abundant along the coast of Portugal, under aerobic, microaerophilic and anaerobic culturing conditions and the exploration of the bacteria’s metabolomes and antimicrobial activities. Joana Couceiro holds a PhD fellowship from the MIT Portugal program and is supervised by Tina Keller-Costa and Rodrigo Costa.
