Bas moved to a new house with a view over the Rhine and gave a housewarming party for the group. “Good food, good wine, good company and a great venue” summarizes the party, according to Brett.

 

Marijke, our senior technician, is never old enough to learn new techniques. Here she proudly presents her first fermentor -still to be tested:-)

She will run controlled batch experiments for the EcoYeast project funded by Era-IB (industrial biotechnology).

 

Theoretical work from two former PhD students in the lab, Meike Wortel and Evert Bosdriesz is now published in Nature Scientific Reports (link to paper). It provides a theory that links molecular networks -using metabolic control analysis- and selection pressure in the chemostat. It is also shown that co-existence of fermenters and respirers can occur in population dynamical simulations of chemostat evolution, when product inhibition is taken into account.

Bas gave a 1 hour tutorial on stoichiometric modelling and flux balance analysis at the Whole Cell Modelling Course in Barcelona. The lecture was taped. It is really basic, but one of the students from the US told Bas that his talk alone was worth the trip over the ocean. Well, that must have been slightly exaggerated, but you can find the talk here.

We are just back from our yearly retreat, this year in Bakkeveen, a village in Friesland. We made a list of problems that we tried to solve in teams. Since we have many new experimental people in the team, focus was on concepts and small toy models. Here Bas explains model making to two of the experimental yeastie boys, Rick and Dennis.

 

On December 17th Timo Maarleveld defended his PhD entitled: “Fluxes and Fluctuations in Biochemical Models”. The committee comprised of prof Klaas Hellingwerf, prof Vitor Martins dos Santos, prof Pieter-Rein Tenwolde, prof Jaap Heringa and prof David Fell. Bas and Frank were promoter, Brett was co-promoter, his first time!