September 2017

iGEM 2017 is well underway with their project to quickly diagnose antibiotic resistance genes. Please read about it and sponsor their efforts here.

August 2017

Franklin gets a VENI grant from NWO!

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

This timelapse over 5 hours shows how antibiotic resistant E. coli bacteria are 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 Tblisi (Georgia) and the Queen Astrid Military Hospital in Brussels (Belgium) are one of the best places 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.

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. 

Februari 2017

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

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.

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.