July 2025

What a month, Daan publishes a review on tRNAs, Rita a paper on phage encoded inhibitors of defense, Marina on arabinosylated phages and Aswin on AVAST5 systems inhibiting Jumbo phages. Incredible.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.