Bachelor's thesis student

Microbial. Sistemes i aplicacions analítiques, S.L.

Molecular Microbiology, Microbial, S.L.

September 2016 - June 2017
Internship and Bachelor's thesis student

In the context of my bachelor’s thesis (BSc in Biotechnology) and under the supervision of Prof. Jesús García-Gil, I studied the diversity of the ileal mucosa-related microbiota of colorectal cancer patients submitted to an ileostomy and its changes after a butyrate treatment. Using DNA extracted from human biopsies of ileal mucosa, we performed qPCR and high-throughput sequencing followed by a SPSS-based statistical analysis to search for the differences between the butyrate-treated, placebo-treated and untreated groups, and we found that some healthy-related butyrate-producing bacteria increased in proportion after the butyrate-treated, but not in the other groups. At the same time, different disease-related bacteria were found to decrease in the butyrate group after the treatment compared to the other groups. Although the changes weren’t higly robust in terms of significancy, the short-period of the treatment (4 weeks) and its conditions (ileostomy allows oxigen to enter the ileum, while it is supposed to be an anoxic environment) made us think that a long-term butyrate treatment could improve microbiological conditions in the studied patients.

Meanwhile, I was performing daily tasks in the company, involving analysis of food and water samples for pathogen detection and food forensics. In this context, I was documenting the sample traceability, performing the bacterial cultures and the qPCR analyses.

Years after that, I mentored an undergraduate student in Prof. Jesús García-Gil’s group, and helped him in the bioinformatics analysis of bacterial 16S rRNA to find the bacterial species were present in a set of soil samples. For this purpose, I taught the basics of Linux/Ubuntu, BLAST, Qiime2 to the student.

Tasks:

DNA extractions of the intestinal biopsies.
qPCR analyses to detect and quantify some of the crucial bacterial families and genera.
SPSS-based statistical analysis for the high-throughput sequencing-derived data.
qPCR analyses to detect and quantify some of the species found to be increased in the sequencing data.
Scientific writting.

Bachelor’s thesis:

Mitjavila-Ventura (2017). Butyrate-induced changes in the diversity of intestinal mucosa-associated microbiota in colorectal cancer patients submitted to a lateral ileostomy. Universitat de Girona (UdG).