Our first sewage sampling in Kuwait
Last May, Underworlds teammates from the Alm lab, Senseable City lab, Kujawinski lab and Eltahir lab travelled to Kuwait to visit our partners. The team had a busy agenda and managed to cover every trip objective and have time to enjoy Kuwait’s delicious food, awesome bazar and Aquarium, and more.
We Alm-labbers (Claire, Paige and I) had the goal to collect the first sewage samples from Kuwait’s sewers :D. So, after an initial set of important meetings with our collaborators, we were ready to get our hands dirty.
This is the manhole we sampled! It was on a beautiful side walk and, thankfully, in the shadow. Ambient temperature was about 100F/38C O_O. It sounds intimidating, but I actually enjoyed the warmth quite a lot after endless months of Boston’s winter :p I think Claire would say the same :p
Then we worked at KISR’s labs to process our sewage samples to do sequencing and metabolomics analyses. This was a great way to teach our protocols to our KISR teammates and also start producing data in Kuwait.
This is a selfie we took at the end of our sampling day. We were very happy that our first attempt to sample and process sewage in Kuwait was successful! More importantly, this sampling day showed us the way we have to adapt our protocols to work optimally in Kuwait’s conditions.
We are incredibly lucky to have Alaa in our team. Besides being generally awesome, she is Kuwaiti and she had the patience to take us around everywhere and show us the coolest things. A personal favorite was visiting Kuwait’s Aquarium. Water and fish make me happy, plus I learned how important it’s been the ocean to Kuwait’s history and development.
Looking forward to next time Kuwait!
