May 2023

The group retreat in the Belgian Ardennes was too much fun

March 2023

Reza obtained his PhD degree with Marileen Dogterom at TU Delft. What a great day for a celebration. Well done!

January 2023

Cristian defended his PhD thesis with great skill. What a superb day it was. We wish you all the best in the future.

November 2022

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

November 2022

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

October 2022

Aswin receiving his PhD in Chemical Engineering on advanced electroporation of mammalian cells. Really well done Dr.

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.

September 2022

Sam receiving two awards from the Dutch Microbiology society (KNVM) and Belgian Society for Viruses of Microbes the work on Craspase. Awesome job and well deserved.

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.

August 2022

Work that was years in the making is now submitted and published as a preprint. Awesome job Rita, Daan and Jelger!

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.

April 2022

Bel and Daan publish their work describing SPARTA pAgo systems in Cell. Great that we could contribute to such beautiful story.

March 2022

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

February 2022

Goodbye Teunke, thank you for all your contributions to the group. We wish you all the best.

January 2022

Cristian publishes two DISARM preprints with our collaborators in Israel and Texas. Really nice job!

October 2021

Becca defending her PhD with class! What a nice day to conclude your journey in the Netherlands. All the best in New Zealand.

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.

September 2021

Jochem defending his PhD thesis as 'the master' of Microbiology and Biophysics. What a great achievement! All the best in New Zealand.

August 2021

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

August 2021

The amazing Rita and Boris publish four new phages we uncovered from wastewater, including a Jumbo phage. That one belong to a new genus named VanLeeuwenhoek viridae. How cool to uncover natural diversity.

August 2021

Kayaking in Delft's 'backcountry'

June 2021

Sebastian defends his PhD thesis on CRISPR-Cas4 with great skill. It was wonderful to have you in the group and we wish you all the best in the future Dr. Kieper!

December 2020

Thank you EU ERC for funding our research into bacterial immune systems! Please see vacancies here.