Afonso Marques Morais

I hold a Bachelor’s in Biology and a Master’s in Evolution and Human Biology from the University of Coimbra. I completed my dissertation in 2024 on “Evaluation of Polymorphisms Influencing Foetal Hemoglobin Levels in a Female Population Sample from São Tomé and Príncipe,” supervised by Dr. Lícinio Manco, and co-authored a poster presented at the 28 th SGPH-Porto in December, titled “Association Study of bcl11a, hbs1l-myb, and Beta-Globin Gene Cluster Polymorphisms with Fetal Hemoglobin (HbF) Levels in a Sample of Women from São Tomé and Príncipe.”
From January to May 2023, I completed a full-time volunteer internship at the Human Genetics Laboratory of the Centre for Research in Anthropology and Health (CIAS) within the Department of Life Sciences. This internship involved 40 hours per week of laboratory work, where I applied molecular biology techniques to study human genetic variability. My training included: DNA extraction from oral and blood cells using silica columns; DNA amplification from blood cells; amplification via Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR); electrophoresis of DNA in agarose and acrylamide gels; and genotyping of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) using restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP). Presently, I am enrolled in an online training about “Essentials of Genomics and Biomedical Informatics” by Bar-Ilan University.