Jorge Carlier

Biography

At present I am working as a Senior Technician in the Chemistry Laboratory at the S2 AQUA – Collaborative Laboratory, Association for Sustainable and Smart Aquaculture.
I have worked as a post doctorate at the Centre of Marine Sciences (CCMAR), Portugal, in the Laboratory of Environmental Technologies, from March 2014 to September 2024, in the following research lines: (a) isolation of bacterial strains with a role in the biodegradation of pharmaceuticals and their use for the bioaugmentation of WWTP sluge aiming to improve water treatment (b) combining the solvent (or liquid-liquid) extraction chemical methods with biological processes for the recovery of metals from industrial wastewaters contaminated with metals; (c optimizing anaerobic and aerobic bioreactors to treat municipal and/or industrial wastewaters with high organic load and industrial wastewaters contaminated with metals; (d) use of analytical techniques to monitor bacterial growth and activity, organic compounds, metals and for the characterization of precipitates resulting from chemical or biological processes, (e) taxonomic studies by DNA analysis to characterize bacterial communities from bioreactors, (f) support in the demonstration phase of projects: construction and evaluation of treatment systems at pilot plant scale.
Before starting to work in this laboratory I visited for two months (January and February 2014) the laboratories of the Comparative Molecular Endocrinology research team of CCMAR, doing mainly bioinformatics analyses: (f) construction of phylogenetic trees based on specific DNA and protein sequences and (g) characterizing the genomic environment of specific genes in order to study the local chromosomic rearrangements occurred during evolution.
Before that, I worked for sixteen and half years (between July 1997 and December 2013) in the Laboratory of Genomics and Genetic Improvement (LGGI) at the University of Algarve, Portugal. The first six years I received grants from research projects, then I benefited of a PhD fellow for three years and the remaining seven and half years I worked as a post-doctorate, having spent six months of those six years at the Crop Centre, School of Life Sciences (former HRI), at Warwick University, United Kingdom. During these sixteen and half years I worked mainly on: (h) genetic diversity studies, (i) genetic mapping of Single Loci and Quantitative Trait Loci (QTLs), (j) constructing a genomic Bacterial Artificial Chromosome (BAC) library, (k) chromosome walking to select BAC clones from targeted mapped regions of interest, (l) preparing libraries of genomic DNA fragments to sequence by massive DNA sequencing technologies, (m) aligning the obtained sequence reads by de novo assembling and reference mapping, (n) identifying Open reading Frames (ORFs) and selecting candidate genes.