After a two-year hiatus because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Frédéric, Lionel, Rémi and Marie-Ka returned to French Guiana in the Pasteur Institute in Cayenne together with Sophie and Mathilde. They spent two weeks the lab of long time collaborator Benoit de Thoisy working on roadkill specimens preserved in the JAGUARS collection (http://kwata.net/la-collection-jaguars-pour-l-etude-de-la-biodiversite.html). This allowed the ConvergeAnt team to perform dissections of roadkill myrmecophagous mammal specimens that were sampled for comparative myological studies, genome and transcriptome sequencing, and microbiome and diet characterization by sequencing of fecal samples. We successfully delocalized our molecular biology lab performing DNA extractions and Nanopore long read sequencing on site using two MinION and two MinION-Mk1C portable sequencers. A very successful mission!
