The paper (in Dutch) in Natuur.Oriolus describes how four students of the University of Applied Sciences Leiden used DNA to establish that a putative hybrid King Eider x Eider that was present along the Flemmish coast in June 2022 was in fact a pure King Eider.
The review resulting from the 2019 Lorentz workshop on predicting evolution, entitled: Towards evolutionary predictions: current promises and challenges has now been published in Evolutionary Applications.
A photo of the DNA walk I did with my colleagues at the Leiden Centre for Applied Biosciene Leiden in Octber 2022. A DNA walk is a guided tour, in this case through the Hortus Botanicus in Leiden, during which I tell stories about the DNA of the plants and animals that we encounter.
On April 25th 2022 everyone with an interest in DNA could join me during a walk through the parks of Leiden, The Netherlands. The trees, birds and flowers seen during the walk each have their own DNA stories to tell.
A new citizen science project has launched in which we will look at the soil microbiome around Tulip bulbs
The manuscript of the review resulting from the 2019 Lorentz workshop on predicting evolution, entitled: The why, what and how of predicting evolution across biology: from disease to biotechnology to biodiversity is now in preprint.
Photo: Herman Berkhoudt
In this project, we aim to gain deeper insight into the molecular mechanisms of Wolbachia-induced parthenogenesis, using the parasitoid wasp Asobara japonica as a model system. We employ a range of sequencing techniques, including whole-genome, IsoSeq and small RNA sequencing.
Collaborators:
Front cover PhD thesis Peter van der Gulik
Transfer RNAs (tRNA) are an integral component of translation in the three domains of life (Archaea, Bacteria and Eukaryotes). In this project, we are searching for domain-specific patterns in the set of tRNAs that are used.
We are also investigating whether these patterns can help assess the completeness of newly assembled genome sequences.
Collaborators:
This soil metagenomics project at the Leiden Centre for Applied Bioscience is studying the soil microbiome of Tulip fields as part of an effort to transform this industry towards more sustainable practices.
The “Rhinoceromics” project at the Leiden Centre for Applied Bioscience is studying health issues in captive black rhino’s using various omics techniques, including metagenomics. As a sideline, we wanted to see whether we could assemble a large eukaryotic genome using only nanopore reads. This produced an assembly of comparable size and contiguity to the current reference genome for this species. Our assembly will be used as reference assembly in the metagenomics project.