Welcome to the Brouns lab

Microbe - Bacteriophage interactions

An adaptive immune system called CRISPR is an advanced weapon that microbes deploy in the war with viruses. This ingenious immune system has a memory and works by encoding small RNA molecules that target the destruction of virus DNA. Nowadays, CRISPR is well known for its revolutionary applications in genome editing with the enzyme Cas9 and Cas12. These enzymes allow changing DNA of any living species.

News

June 2017

Jakub Wiktor from Cees Dekker's lab successfully defended his thesis on Live cell studies of bacterial DNA replication, recombination and degradation. Well done Kuba!

May 2017

Franklin and I made a timelapse over 5 hours of antibiotic resistant E. coli bacteria being killed by phage. Perhaps one day the full potential of bacteriophages will be exploited for the treatment of infectious diseases in the Netherlands. Until then the Eliava Institute in Georgia is one of the best place for phage therapy.

April 2017

Our review on how CRISPR systems generate memories of their invading viruses was published in Science. This was a great collaboration with the Fineran lab in New Zealand.

April 2017

Cristian joined as a PhD candidate. Welcome to the group!

March 2017

The Nanofront winter retreat in Courchevel (France) was a great succes. Hardcore science and skiing turned out to be a good combination.

March 2017

Commented on the potential of phage therapy in Zorg.nu on Dutch national television. Other guests included Jesse Nederlof and Prof. Jan Kluytmans.

March 2017

100 years of Microbiology in Wageningen is celebrated with a symposium. Feel free to register

Februari 2017

Franklin defended his thesis in front of a committee of Peter Fineran, Just Vlak, Rob Lavigne and Bertus Beaumont. Well done!

January 2017

iGEM 2017 has started. The team consists of 13 enthusiastic and bright students. Go for it team!

November 2016

Gave a talk at the Dutch Future Society in Amsterdam about the future of genome editing. What should have been a 30 minute presentation ended up being 1 hour and 30 minutes. Never had so many questions.

September 2016

After a summer of ordering equipment the lab in Delft is now operational! Seb, Becca, Marre and Fiona are the first users.

August 2016

Tim publishes a paper in Molecular Cell. Great stuff!

The paper describes that CRISPR systems cleverly couple target interference to CRISPR memory update. The Cas3 nuclease fragments invader DNA into pieces of near-spacer length enriched for PAM sequences on 30 ends to form spacer precursors.

August 2016

A very cool animation on the impact and future of CRISPR tools

June 2016

The laboratory of Microbiology has finally moved into the HELIX building on campus. A great place for interdisciplinary interactions between the chair groups.

June 2016

Started working for Bionanoscience at TU Delft in their new Applied Sciences building. I am really looking forward to this. Anna Haagma joined as a technician to help setup the lab. Welcome!

Visiting address

Van der Maasweg 9, 2629 HZ Delft, Netherlands, T +31 15 2783920

Department of Bionanoscience, Kavli Institute of Nanoscience, Delft University of Technology

Applied Sciences Building (nr. 58) Office E1.480,

Host institutes

Research interest

My lab is interested in the interaction between microbes and viruses. We study the mechanisms that bacteria and archaea use to protect themselves from virus infection including CRISPR, and explore the adaptations that viruses have evolved to avoid defence systems. We isolate and engineer bacteriophages for phage therapy applications.