During the months of November and December, the oceanographic vessel "Miguel Oliver"  (Spanish General Fisheries Secretary) will be along the Guinea-Bissau coast supporting multiple scientific teams. One of them will include members of Fish-DNA-Monitor team, that will collect tissues from multiples fish species, ichthyoplankton and Environmental DNA. In the first week of November we went to Vigo, where Miguel Oliver was docked, and delivered all material and reagents for the collection procedures. Best luck to all crew members!

A poster with preliminary results from Fish-DNA-Monitor was presented at the IV International Meeting of The Portuguese Society Of Genetics, that was held between the 19 and 20 of October of 2023 at University of Minho.

In the photo is our master student João Meira, that presented is project : Fish Monitoring and Biodiversity Assessment in the Atlantic : Building DNA-Barcode Reference Libraries for Cabo Verde and Guine-Bissau. 

Well Done, João!

The issue 3 - August 2023 from the OBON newsletter has a mention to the FISH-DNA-MONITOR, in particular it's 1st Workshop held on the 27 and 28  June 2023 at Minho University. Check this and other meaningful updates from this network here 

On the 7th of July, Fish-DNA-Monitor's Principal Investigator Filipe O. Costa give a presentation at the Encontro Nacional de Ciência (Aveiro) on the subject of Marine Biodiversity Monitoring and Management, in which he lectured about the the potential and usefulness of genetic based methodologies such as Barcoding, Metabarcoding and Environmental DNA.

On the 27th and 28th of June at University of Minho (Braga), the 1st Workshop in the framework of FISH-DNA-MONITOR, a project funded by the Aga Khan Development Network and FCT, that aims to assist Guinea-Bissau in the monitoring and management of their fisheries resources through the implementation of cutting-edge DNA based methodologies, was realised. In this meeting with all project team members, the Instituto Nacional de Investigação de Pesca e Oceanografia (INIPO, Guinea-Bissau) and the Instituto Español de Oceanografia (IEO), by Dr Iça Barri and Dr Ignacio Sobrino, were represented. Moreover, in line with one the main tasks of the project; training of Guinea-Bissau staff; a technician from INIPO spent the following week in the ME-Barcode laboratory at UMinho, practicing DNA extraction protocols related to metabarcoding of zooplankton and eDNA.  

João T. Fontes's communication "Updated phylogeography of the widely distributed John Dory (Zeus faber, Actinopterygii: Zeiformes) reaffirms the prevalence of at least two deeply divergent evolutionary lineages", supported by the Fish-DNA-Monitor project, earned an Honorable Mention at the XVIII National Meeting of Evolutionary Biology (Braga, December 2022). Congrats!