Eunice van Pelt-Kleinjan

About me
In 2017 I finished the master Bioinformatics and Systems Biology at the VU. Before I obtained a bachelor degree in Biomedical Sciences and in February 2017 I started with my PhD in the Systems Bioinformatics group. In my PhD project, I work together with three other PhD students from the VU and Wageningen university on a project called “Evolutionary trade-offs in dairy fermentations”. In cells trade-offs are defined as optimizing one trait at the cost of another. An example is when the cell puts lots of energy into the formation of large proteins then there is less energy left for growth. This project will investigate which trade-offs occur in relevant conditions and transitions in the dairy industry, and to what extent trade-offs can be explained from a cellular resource allocation perspective. My part is to extend a genome-scale metabolic model for L. lactis with the costs for protein and mRNA synthesis and degradation. This model will be used for data integration and simulations to identify possible trade-offs and the associated constraints. This will help the dairy industry to improve their fermentation processes