Lab News

We all moved for three days to Groesbeek for our yearly lab retreat, this year organised by three new PhD students, Eunice, Daan and Sieze. They did a wonderful job: many people introduced a problem in the morning, from technical (how to model complex communities) to more evolutionary (why do lactic acid bacteria make flavours?),

Herbert Sauro, systems and synthetic biologist from University of Washington, Seattle, recommended the 2015 BioEssays review that Johan wrote together with Frank and Bas, saying it is an essential read for biochemistry textbook writers. The review is about the regulation of glycolysis, explained from a functional supply-demand perspective. See for the recommendation text. Thanks for the

On the 13th of April, our institute, the Amsterdam Institute for Molecules, Medicines and Systems (AIMMS), organised its annual symposium with a PhD student contest for best talk of the day. Iraes Rabbers presented her thesis work on the optimality of protein expression in E coli, and won! Congrats Iraes, well done!

On March 28 we have an exciting number of presentations scheduled by yeast experimentalists and theoretical systems biologists trying to work out the underlying principles of metabolic regulation. You are welcome to attend this meeting. For more information, go and see the meeting information here.

In the latest results from the National Student Enquete (Inquiry) NSE our master got an 8.2 out of 10, and this makes it officially a TOP master, one of only 6 TOP masters at the VU. The master is a joined effort of Systems Bioinformatics and Bioinformatics from the VU, and the Life Science groups from the

Bas was asked to contribute recommendations to the Faculty of 1000, and group members can nominate papers, and help write the recommendation – and get the credits. This month’s recommendation can be seen here. Article details: Dynamic control of gene regulatory logic by seemingly redundant transcription factors. Z AkhavanAghdam, J Sinha, OP Tabbaa and N

Jurgen published a paper from his postdoc in the labs of Prof. Barbara Bakker (UMCG) and Hans Westerhoff (Molecular Cell Physiology, AIMMS, VU) What it is about: To avoid side-effects of drug treatment to healthy cells, drug target selection studies often focus on protein targets that are only found a disease-causing cell. However, many disease-causing

More and more ‘dry’ scientists are going into the wetlab. Today, Rinke showed students and Bob (on the right) around in our wetlab as part of the Workshop Mathematical Modelling (a third year course for VU and UvA Mathematics students). Will this be a one-time event or do they now never want to leave the wetlab…?

Chrats is a computer scientist specialised in machine learning, which he applies to metagenomics data of wine fermentations. He could not resist to test some of his predictions in the lab. One of the great advantages of having both dry and wet people in the same lab. We are all very proud…