Dhivyaa Rajasundaram, PhD student at University of Potsdam, was seconded to INRA from March to June 2014. On her last day in Nantes, she gave us a few words about her experience at INRA:

"My three-month secondment to INRA, Nantes was a very useful one for my PhD. I had the opportunity to learn about spectroscopy (Infrared and Raman) and the image processing methods to couple images from these two techniques.

I would like to thank Marie-Françoise for explaining me from scratch, the basics of images to the application of pre-processing and normalisation methods and algorithms. Also, I would like to extend my thanks to Fabienne, Paul, Sylvie, and Anne-Laure for the Infrared experiments in Arabidopsis. It was very pleasant to work in INRA and all my colleagues were super friendly. It was  also nice to spend time with my other WallTraC colleagues Alex, Fanny and Merve.

Overall, I enjoyed my stay in Nantes very much and of course loved the French food". Dhivyaa

WallTraC sixth training event was hosted by INRA in France. It provided the basis to analyse oligosaccharides by mass spectrometry, as well as an introduction to quality management and to occupational health & safety. Mercedes, and Praveen, PhD student at U.Leeds and Max Planck I., respectively gave us their impression at the end of the event:

“We have just had a superb training at INRA. Our non-scientific training was run by David Ropartz and Laura Lanet who gave us an overview on quality management and health and safety.

We learnt what quality management is and how quality standards, such as ISO 9001, are developed and put into practice.  Also, we were shown how important health and safety is in a workplace, we were presented with real examples which made very easy to understand how to identify hazards in our work environment, take precautions and, thus, prevent accidents.

I think non—scientific training like these lectures is important for our training, and these talks in particular were very clear and provided us with very valuable knowledge for us as PhD students.” Mercedes.

"The training event was well organised and started off with a good introductory lecture on the various kinds of Mass spectrometry tools used at INRA and how they can be useful in various fields of plant research especially in plant cell walls.

This was followed by a brief and simple tutorial on how to perform structural linkage analysis on pectin’s and hemicelluloses which was of more interest to me. In the end the training event proved to be quiet useful as I had the chance to learn and apply a few tips and tricks of Mass spectrometry into the plant cell wall field.

Moreover, INRA holds a fantastic working atmosphere and some experts in the field of mass spectrometry which made it an ideal choice to organise this training event." Praveen

Valérie Cornuault, PhD student at the University of Leeds was seconded to Bayer CropScience for two weeks in February 2014. On her last day, she gave us a few words about what this experience brought her:

"It was a great pleasure for me to go back to the beautiful city of Ghent and spend two weeks in Bayer CropScience.

This secondment gave me the opportunity to analyse several of my samples using equipment which unfortunately we do not have access to in Leeds University. In addition, I got to learn gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS) and linkage analysis which are very important techniques in the cell wall field. Jean-Luc was very helpful and despite some technical problems we were able to complete all the analysis.

In addition, these two weeks gave me a good feeling of what it is like to work in an international company, which I found very valuable.

I would like to thank Frank Meulewaeter for being so welcoming, Nadine and Karel for being very nice and fun lab mates and to the other Bayer employees for their kindness. These two weeks were a lot of fun and in the same time very useful for the end of my PhD." Val