February 2026

Daan defending an excellent thesis after 4 years of hard work. What a rewarding day.

February 2026

With 60 participants the Phage Infection and Immunity Mechanisms symposium was a success.

January 2026

Kostas publishes a review on the new research field of Proteases in phage defense systems and their potential for bioengineering.

September 2025

A very interesting preprint by Daan, Rita and Jelger on the modular architecture of phage defense systems, and how that can be exploited to discover new phage defense gene clusters. Check out the two jumbo phage specific defense systems Dionysus and Ophion, and the intriguing Ambrosia.

July 2025

Bacteria defend, but bacteriophages have the counterweapons to inhibit bacterial defense. Anti-zorya, anti-duantia, anti- Thoeris, anti-radar. Another great CHM paper from the team.

July 2025

Thank you Jelger for being part of the team and for bringing so much joy to the workplace. All the best

July 2025

Daan publishes a review on tRNAs. Great overview of the diversity of roles, including the role of overcoming phage defense.

July 2025

Aswin publishes his preprint on AVAST5 systems inhibiting Jumbo phages. Cool to see how this defense system provides specialized defense against this advanced phage.

May 2025

What a fun time we had at the annual retreat.

February 2025

The TV show Focus from NTR was in Delft  and we imaged bacteriophages that cured this gentleman from his 10 year+ infection in his shoulder.

July 2024

Using Eukaryotic antiviral defense systems to predict antiphage activities in Pseudomonas. Amazing work by Daan, Rita and Jelger now published in CHM. 

June 2024

Sam did an amazing job during his PhD and defended brilliantly. Congrats with your well deserved degree. We wish you all the best.

May 2024

The retreat to the Belgian coast was amazing.

February 2024

Work that was years in the making about the role of phage defense systems in pathogenic bacteria is now published. Awesome job Rita, Daan and Jelger!

June 2023

Daan publishes his hypothesis in eLife that phage tRNAs are there to resist the action of host tRNA nucleases that try to deplete tRNAs during phage infection. Is this 50-year old mystery now finally solved? See also this blog.

May 2023

The group retreat in the Belgian Ardennes was too much fun

November 2022

Amazing structure of a Jumbo phage infecting pathogenic bacteria. What a collaboration with Leiden University led by Ruochen Ouyang and Ariane Briegel.

October 2022

Massive NRM review on the amazing Type III and VI CRISPR-Cas systems, and how they act, sometimes at the cost of cell suicide. Great work by Sam and Alicia, with student Jasper.

September 2022

Marina publishes her review on methods to engineer a bacteriophage genome. Perfect timing for a those phage engineers. Great stuff.

August 2022

A beautiful story together with Ailong Ke and Chunyi Hu on RNA-activated protease activity by Craspase is now published in Science. Great work by the Delft team headed by Sam. Read the background and see how the protease is activated here.

May 2022

Becca's paper with Emma was published measuring individual CRISPR response of cells. So cool to see CRISPR in action in individual cells.

March 2022

What a nice way to spend the day in the amusement park Efteling, after such a long time of COVID restrictions.

October 2021

Beautiful review by Julia and Rita on bacteriophage defense systems and their (unknown) clinical relevance. Thanks Pieter-Jan Haas MD (UMCU) for joining this effort.

October 2021

Together with the Ailong Ke lab at Cornell we publish a Cas4 paper in Nature, describing how this protein achieves PAM selection during CRISPR adaptation. What a result. Thanks Chunyi & Ailong, Cristobal, Rita, Jochem, Anna et al.

October 2021

Jochem becomes a bioinformatician during COVID with this paper: lessons for CRISPR spacer matching in metagenomic databases. 32% of the spacers match the database, 200 identified PAMs, PAM predictions from repeat nucleotides, evidence for spacer sharing.

August 2021

Sam publishes the gRAMP paper in Science. Getting Caspase involved in CRISPR gives Craspase. What an awesome result and team effort.