Lab News

On March 11th we had a very exciting Internship Students Symposium! A total of 23 students from the MCB department presented the work that their are going to do in the lab in front of their peers and the staff. About 50 people joined the symposium and we had a very lively scientific discussion after

Adaptive changes of sediment microbial communities associated with cleanup of oil spills in Nigerian mangrove forests.

We are very excited with the news that Evelina and Johan were both awarded an early-career support grant by the recently formed A-life. These grants will allow both of them to appoint a PhD student and to further develop their research endeavors through new collaborations within A-life.

At the13th international symposium on lactic acid bacteria Eunice van Pelt – KleinJan, PhD student in Bas Teusink’s group, won the LABIP poster award for excellent research with industrial relevance. The poster “Proteome constraints shape Lactococcus lactis’ metabolic behaviour” shows that we can understand the changes and choices in energy metabolism that Lactococcus lactis (needed a.o. for Gouda cheese) makes,

Research article with Remco: Different Resource Allocation in a Bacillus subtilis Population Displaying Bimodal Motility. Collaboration between TNO, UvA and VU about resource allocation in Bacillus subtilis leads to new study published in Journal of Bacteriology this month (June 2021).

A key question in microbial ecology is what the driving forces behind the persistence of large biodiversity in natural environments are. We studied a microbial community with more than 100 different types of species which evolved in a 15-years old bioreactor with benzene as the main carbon and energy source and nitrate as the electron

Abstract Microbial community profiling using high-throughput sequencing relies in part on the preservation of the DNA and the effectiveness of the DNA extraction method. This study aimed at understanding to what extent these parameters affect the profiling. We obtained samples treated with and without a preservation solution. Also, we compared DNA extraction kits from Qiagen

Abstract Fine-tuning cellular physiology in response to intracellular and environmental cues requires precise temporal and spatial control of gene expression. High-resolution imaging technologies to detect mRNAs and their translation state have revealed that all living organisms localize mRNAs in subcellular compartments and create translation hotspots, enabling cells to tune gene expression locally. Therefore, mRNA localization

Julius Battjes will work on the ZeroYeast project together with Chr Hansen, and make a proteome-constrained model of Pichia kluyveri with the aim to transfer knowledge from S cerevisiae to another industrial yeast. 

When Bas Teusink and Douwe Molenaar came to the VU University, about a decade ago, they had just published a thought-provoking paper on how microbial physiology can result from optimal allocation of biosynthetic resources, such as ribosomes, RNA polymerases, amino acids, energy, etc., in order to maximise growth rate (https://doi.org/10.1038/msb.2009.82). Roughly at the same time,