 I'm Eva Sunshine. I work as a senior scientist at the Technical University of Denmark in the Department of Bioengineering and I work on marine microbial discovery. So we are at the end of day one of the Miffy conference and we are actually one of the lecture theaters that we were watching so many great lectures today and I'm here with Eva and I'm gonna ask her a few questions to know more about her session and insights about her own research. So let's address the session first. How did it go? How did you feel going back to an in-person conference after quite a long time? Yeah it was just some bits so fantastic right? I mean it is just really what I think science is also about to talk and exchange your ideas with people and it just works so much better in person. And can you tell us a little bit about what your session was about? Yeah so the whole session was about genome sequencing and analysis and I think the talks were very nicely organized so for example in front of me there was a speaker talking about F-cell guidelines and then I presented our study on how we actually used the F-cell guidelines to describe a marine bacterium. And then you gave your your own talk right on how you can use probiotics to address bacterial infections in a co-culture. Yes exactly so yeah we have been studying a marine bacterium called pheobacter and hebens for many years now in the group and also other scientists have been working on the strains because it has a very potent activity against fish pathogenic bacteria such as ribbureous. And in this review article that we just published now together with scientists from from Nardement we actually made a review of this core knowledge on the strain and also made a safety assessment on the strain so we for example screened the genes for antibiotic resistant genes and so on. And is this bacterium found naturally in the environment? Exactly that is really one of the benefits of the strains and also why we think it is a really good candidate to be a probiotic for acroculture because it has originally been isolated from acrocultures and occurs naturally in acrocultures. Yeah and then how does the probiotic action come from? Where does it come from? It could actually be pinned down to one very specific small secondary metabolite called tropoethic acid and that is really potent against these fish pathogens. Okay and then like in terms of resistance because I know that there's a huge issue about using antibiotics in acroculture because of the resistance that they can develop afterwards so does this occur also? Do you see resistance also being developed under this compound? No and this is also why we found the strain so interesting so in our group actually there was a study or several studies actually undertaken to really try to cause resistant resistance in fish pathogens and it was just not possible even if we you know try to evolve them to be resistant to this compound this did not happen. So I see a lot of you know advantages when it comes to using this in a real setting. How close are you in you know applying this this into the normal practice? Exactly yeah this is really where this collaboration with LaLemon comes in because they're really interested in the strain and they're currently working really hard to actually make this into a product which is great to see this academic knowledge that has been developed over the past years to to get into an application so I hope it will work out efficiently. Yeah and it's great that you you know you can achieve such a collaboration and both investigating also the science but also in the application side of this as well. Do you envision that you can use it also in other in other types except aquaculture? We're hoping for this that you know the more interesting candidates we obtain from the marine environment be for example specific microorganisms also microbiomes or biactive molecules the more you know attention they gain that also people would see a wider possibility of application. So for example I'm now part of a big IU project called Marbles where we exploit the marine biodiversity not only for aquaculture but actually also for horticulture. Because you know today we've heard a lot about using probiotics in humans so it's actually very interesting that you also do research probiotics aquaculture and I also hear now on the environment so yeah it's great to see how research is evolving around these feed and food ingredient theme and topic. Yeah absolutely I think we learn a lot from each other right or yeah of course there's a lot of resources put towards I think human health of course we've seen that over the past decades and so from an environmental side it's really nice that we you know can go and see how they are doing things and then see how we can translate it is in other areas. Those were the questions that I prepared for you today just I want to thank you again for for your time here and I hope you enjoy the final day of the conference tomorrow. Yeah thank you so much thanks for giving me the opportunity to talk.