The wonderful Romuald Tcheutchoua visited us for a couple of weeks from Seirian Sumner’s group at University College London to analyse the guts of wasps from farms across Cameroon! Romuald is looking at the provision of ecosystem services like crop pest biocontrol by wasps in agricultural systems (particularly predation of the devastating fall army worm), and his wider PhD project takes a social-ecological approach to exploring the importance of wasps for smallholder farms.
Romuald used the high-throughput robotics, diagnostic platforms and nanopore sequencers at the Newcastle University School of Natural and Environmental Sciences Molecular Diagnostics Facility to analyse his wasp guts. From DNA extraction and PCR to equimolar sample pooling and library preparation, he got through a whopping ~2,300 PCRs in the two weeks! He has also been testing a new PCR primer pair designed to exclude wasp DNA from PCR amplification.
We look forward to welcoming Romuald back to Newcastle at some point soon!
Foraging Ecology Research Group 
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