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Long Night of Research 2018:

Large crowds at the BBMRI.at and BBMRI-ERIC boths and the Biobank Graz Tour

At the Long Night of Research BBMRI.at, Biobank Graz, and BBMRI-ERIC enabled Austrian citizens to experience biobanking and made them aware of this topic. The interest was enormous. Over 200 people attended the multiple Biobank Graz tours and put hands-on at the 3 BBMRI boths.

How does my blood test help researchers across Europe to develop drugs more efficiently? What is a biobank, why is it important and how does it look like "inside"? How can samples be conserved for biobanking and research? What exactly do biobankers, pathologists and researchers with samples – for example with tissue? …

At our booths and our biobank tours visitors learned about all this.Young visitors could slip into the role of a biobanker, pathologist or researcher and pipet (raspberry juice) blood, snap-freeze (sausage) tissue in liquid nitrogen, stain real paraffin sections and identify what stained tissue from different organs looks like in the microscope. In addition, they got some insight into the way a blood or tissue takes from the patient to a final drug.