Just like making my first blog post, it took me some time to get used to this city and my internship. After a few weeks I can now say with confidence that I am really starting to like this city. Going abroad for your internship is not only a unique opportunity to work in a place with different challenges and opportunities, it is also a way to explore a new city, and what it has to offer. In the following posts I will talk about what this city has to offer, what I do in my free time and of course what I do at my internship.
So lets start with where I live. I live in a student dorm called Cvjetno Naselje.
This dorm is located south of the city center, but still north of the Save. I am very happy with this neighborhood and what it has to offer, but more on that later. I share a room with Ante Culo, my roommate. He is from Croatia not far from Zagreb, and has been living here in the dorm for the past few years. He is a very nice guy and was especially helpful the first weeks to show me around and helped me get to know the neighborhood.
The faculty where I work with the Bioinformatics team of Prof. Vlahovicek is located north of the city.
Prof. Vlahovicek is a pleasant man and his engaging group of bioinformaticians are all very intresting, likable and pleasant people to work and hang around with.
I will try to keep the next part about what I do here as short and understandable as possible although this won't be easy.
In the last few weeks i have been working on addapting an R script to work on metagenome datasets. The R script allows the calculation of different codon usage bias statistics and codon usage-based predictors of gene expression, gene set enrichment analysis of annotated sequences, and several methods for visualization of CU and enrichment analysis results. This is done by the use of a package which is well described. For the last few weeks I have been adapting it to work on much more samples than the two described. In this way I create insight about what the package is capable of doing and I learn a lot about metagenomes in general. If this is confusing, no worries so it still is for me. More on this later as well.
I think I will end here for my first post and talk to you in the next one cheers!