Lab News

PhD candidate Maarten Droste is one of the recipients of the famous Red Sock Award for best poster presentation at the SIAM 2023 Conference on Applications of Dynamical Systems in Portland, Oregon. It is a tradition that each prize winner receives a pair of red socks as part of the award. His winning poster, entitled “Determinants of optimal metabolic pathway choice by microorganisms”, is co-authored

After a few years break, finally it was again time for a lab outing. In the lovely setting of Berg en Dal, we enjoyed three days (April 19th-21st) of networking and conviviality. “Mens sana, in corpore sano” they say, so we stretched both our muscles, with plenty of biking, jeu de boules, ping pong and football, and

We combined our expertise in Gene expression regulation, Single-molecule RNA imaging, and Prokaryotic quantitative cell physiology to write a truly multidisciplinary review. It’s the product of a team effort by Alan Gerber (Amsterdam UMC), Sander van Otterdijk (Sysbio),  Frank Bruggeman (Sysbio) and Evelina Tutucci (Sysbio). We discussed state-of-the-art imaging approaches for the measurement and quantitative

Pranas successfully defended his PhD thesis, titled “Constrain and conquer: explaining metabolic strategies of microbial life through optimal resource allocation” on March 20 2023. The promotors were Bas Teusink (VU Amsterdam) and Ursula Kummer (Heidelberg); Frank Bruggeman, Jack Pronk, Maria Suarez Diez, Peter Swain, and Meike Wortel were in the thesis committee. Pranas will stay

Together with Daan de Groot and Erik van Nimwegen, both in the Basel Biozentrum, and Age Tjalma, currently at AMOLF (Amsterdam), Frank was involved in a study on microbial phenotype switching which has recently been published in PNAS. Daan and Age previously worked in our lab. A fundamental limitation causes microbes to continuously struggle for

Nitrogen limitation found as reason for lactate production Nitrogen composition determines the amount of lactate produced by yeast Lachancea thermotolerans in wine fermentations. Here we describe this phenomenon for the first time in the journal Food Microbiology. Knowledge about the role of nitrogen in the fermentation process of wine with yeast Lachancea thermotolerans may lead

After two years of online events, Pint of Science is back in your local pub! Pint22 will be hosting Science talks from May 9-11 and you will be able to enjoy mind-blowing scientific talks with a cold beer at your local bar in Amsterdam. The program of this year includes talks about laboratory meat, plant-based

We recently published a new paper, https://febs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/febs.16401. Below you find a short reflection on this paper. Microbial behaviour has been shaped by evolution. Our understanding is that the best adapted genetic variants are outcompeting the others — which explains their frequency increase and their selection. These fit variants generate novel genetic variants, which perform even

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