‘Praesidium Libertatis is a daily responsibility.’ These were the words of Rector Magnificus Carel Stolker on 8 February during the 443rd Dies Natalis of Leiden University. The University needs to pay continuous attention to open debate if it wants to remain a bastion of freedom.

Students gain practical experience while clients receive a solution to their software needs: the student software company LUdev hits two birds with one stone. ‘Through LUdev, students learn what else is involved in software development besides programming.’ Interested? You can now submit new projects…

Some bacteria, it turns out, have proteins much like ours that organise the DNA in their cells. They just do it a bit differently. This is revealed by new research from biochemists at the Leiden Institute of Chemistry and the Max Planck Institute for Biology. The discovery helps us better understand…

Burnout is on the increase. It is caused by group pressure, being ‘on’ all the time and asking too much of ourselves. Clinical psychologist Bart Verkuil advises lowering our expectations.

Leiden and Jülich researchers discovered an elegant and simple approach to improve the sensitivity of graphene biosensors. These so-called ‘next generation graphene electronic biochemical sensor devices’ are able to detect very low amounts of HIV DNA thanks to their very low electronic noise.

For decades, scholars have wondered about the development and dissemination of languages around the world. What are the odds that peoples living thousands of miles apart speak varieties of Indo-European languages that are closely related? This riddle has now partly been solved thanks to an international…

Jildau Bouwman has been named as professor by special appointment of the chair ‘Remote Health Monitoring’ at Leiden University. The systems biologist and TNO Digital Health Innovation figurehead will investigate how digital solutions can contribute to better healthcare at home. ‘Home care is often more…

Immediately connect with the needs of industry with your master’s degree. The new course Practical Aspects of Quality Management in Pharma and Biotech provides just that. The LACDR and LUMC set up the course together with the Biotech Training Facility, located at the Leiden Bio Science Park. The first…

Paul Brakefield, Professor of Evolutionary Biology at the Institute of Biology in Leiden (IBL) has been awarded an ERC Advanced Grant for his research. He will receive 2.5 million euro to develop his research programme over a period of five years.

A consortium of researchers from the Leiden Institute of Physics (LION), the Institute of Biology Leiden (IBL), and the Leiden Institute of Chemistry (LIC) received a FOM program grant to develop a novel way of studying individual proteins inside a cell using gold nanorods.

There is greater variety in the size of men’s brains than of women’s. This could help explain why some psychiatric disorders such as ADHD and autism are more prevalent in boys. Leiden brain researcher Lara Wierenga has published an article about this in the international journal Cerebral Cortex.

When university lecturer Martine Bruil was on exchange in Ecuador as a teenager, she fell in love with the area's ancient languages. Now, more than 20 years later, she is starting a research project on the kinship of the language Awapit with the Quechua language that was spread by the Incas.

Leiden PhD candidate Jo-Anne Verschoor discovered that nearly twenty percent of the bacterial strains she studied could degrade plastic, though they needed some encouragement to do so. ‘Bacteria are just like people,’ says Verschoor. Her research was published in the journal Communications Biology,…

Macrophages – the front line of our immune system – protect us from infections. But in the case of the tuberculosis bacteria, this often goes wrong. The group of Annemarie Meijer from the Leiden Institute of Biology has now discovered that macrophages in zebrafish are better able to eliminate tuberculosis…

What chemicals do plants have available, and what happens if they use them when faced with bacteria or fungi? That is what PhD candidate Luis Salomé Abarca is keen to learn. He studies plants’ survival and their use of chemical components in communication and defence. Salomé Abarca works at the Natural…

Merijn de Bakker and colleagues of the IBL-research group of Prof. Mike Richardson provide a unique view on digit evolution in crocodiles and birds in their recent study published in Nature.

Sustainable biotechnology, new insights into genome evolution and combining forces in mathematics. The NWO has awarded grants to these three innovative Leiden research projects in the ENW-M Open Competition.

Salma Balazadeh, Víctor Carrión, and Jos Raaijmakers, biologists at the Institute of Biology Leiden (IBL), have successfully applied for an NWO grant and got awarded 730.000 euros. The board of NWO Domain Applied and Engineering Sciences awarded funding for their project within the Open Technology Programme…

Nanoparticles that transport medicines to a specific part of the human body are usually broken down in the liver prematurely. Jeroen Bussmann from Leiden University has discovered a new method to prevent this from happening. Publication in ACS Nano.

Seven new Medical Delta professors revealed their research plans in a lecture marathon on 21 June. The professors at Leiden University, the LUMC, Delft University of Technology and the Erasmus Medical Centre Rotterdam operate at the interface between life sciences and health and technology.

Of the 87 Vidi research subsidies awarded by NWO, five have been awarded to Leiden researchers. This represents almost 6 per cent of the successful applications.

When a bacterium becomes more resistant to one antibiotic, it sometimes becomes more sensitive to another. To better understand this interaction, researchers from the Leiden Institute of Biology (IBL) and the Leiden Academic Center for Drug Research (LACDR) under supervision of Daniel Rozen and Coen…

Women are more often diagnosed with depression, whereas ADHD is much more frequently detected in men. And there are other more striking differences. What role does the brain play in mental health and what is the influence of the environment? For answers to these questions, listen to the ‘(Un)gendered…

Leiden researcher Dr Ben Zonneveld has determined the size of the genome - the amount of DNA per nucleus - of wild tulips. His conclusion is that there are more than 87 wild species. Various possibly new species have been discovered.

Clinical psychologist Bernet Elzinga has been appointed as Professor of a personal chair at the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences. This professorship will contribute both nationally and internationally to the broader promotion of Leiden University in the field of stress and psychopathology.

For already two years, Vincent Niochet has been affiliated with the Leiden Faculty of Archaeology as an external PhD candidate. Now, he has been awarded an NWO PhDs in the Humanities grant, allowing him to continue his research as a paid PhD staff member. ‘The past two years have been quite challenging,…

IBL-researchers revealed in a new study that insects are successful on land because their eggs became protected against desiccation. An extraembryonic membrane in the egg, the serosa, helped insects to make the transition from water to land.

It might be possible to prevent atherosclerosis by changing the appearance of macrophages, cells of the immune system that for example digest foreign substances. In her PhD dissertation, Baoyan Ren examined several ways to do so.

Thanks in part to the persistence of a Leiden research group, cancer could be detected in the near future with just a single drop of blood. Not only can the diagnosis be determined at an earlier stage, but the blood test is also cheap, fast and patient friendly. The first results of this method seem…

For four years, Vicky Beckers examined thin slices of wood under a microscope, mapping the anatomy of two plant families. Her research helps identify different wood species, benefiting both the timber trade and archaeology.

A team of laboratory astrophysicists from Leiden University managed to make glycerol under conditions comparable to those in dark interstellar clouds. They allowed carbon monoxide ice to react with hydrogen atoms at minus 250 degrees Celsius. The researchers publish their findings in the Astrophysical…

Biological chemist Nathaniel Martin and his team received an NWO grant to examine how blocking a specific enzyme in our body, NNMT, could be helpful in the treatment of some cancers. Trials with mice have been promising, and together with the Netherlands Cancer Institute, Martin wants to take the next…

The government is investing 646 million euros and has set aside a further 3.5 billion to drive economic growth in the Netherlands. Much of the National Growth Fund will be used for scientific innovations. Leiden University is involved in three of the projects.

On Friday 17 April Leiden Mayor Henri Lenferink will officially open the new Metabolomics Facility of Leiden University. The facility’s ultimate goal is to prevent disease and to improve health throughout the human lifespan.

As far as Daniël Pijnappels, Professor of Cellular Electrophysiology, is concerned, both researching and inventing are essential for a scientist.

Dutch researchers have developed a new tool to label DNA for studying chromosomes in live cells. The tool is non-invasive and can be applied in culture but also in living organisms, such as zebrafish embryos. The team published their findings in the journal Nucleic Acids Research.

Professor by Special Appointment of Clinical Neuropharmacology Geert Jan Groeneveld will deliver his inaugural lecture entitled ‘The importance of the biomarker’ on 11 March 2022. According to him, new genetic knowledge will revolutionise drug research.

Medical Delta has appointed seven professors who will bridge the medical worlds of Leiden, Delft and Rotterdam.

Biotechnological developments are moving fast. From genetically modified plant varieties we are now moving to cultured meat. These developments require moral interpretation - and they get it in the form of art. Lotte Pet wrote a dissertation about it.

For nine years he worked on the three-volume standard work Plant Galls of Europe. It yielded 2300 pages about 10,000 species of European galls, abnormal outgrowths in plants caused by parasites. Hans Roskam from the Institute of Biology Leiden: ‘The abundance of galls says something about the natural…

No less than four Leiden research teams have been awarded a grant by NWO. On 27 July NWO honoured 21 applications in the Open Competition ENW-XL. NWO awards the grants to consortia in the exact and natural sciences who are doing unconnected fundamental research that is 'driven by curiosity'.

Former dean and physicist Frans Saris writes in his new book ‘Darwin’s combination lock’ how our culture enabled us to dominate nature and about the corresponding responsibilities. Together with Joris Berkhout he will talk about his book during the This Week’s Discoveries on 27 February.

Zebrafish-human communication shows that cancer cells lacking a signaling protein are less able to develop aggressive metastatic properties. This discovery has been made by molecular cell biologist Claudia Tulotta. PhD defence 14 June.

Tropical butterflies adapt to their environment to improve their chances of survival. The changes are triggered by hormone signals that transmit information about temperature to the butterflies' tissues. Biologist Ana Rita Mateus shows how a complex combination of environment, physiology and genetics…

The Dutch X-omics Initiative has received seventeen million euros from NWO as part of the National Roadmap for Large-Scale Infrastructure. Leiden University’s metabolomics research led by Thomas Hankemeier is one of the participators.

Researchers from the Institute of Biology Leiden have discovered how good intestinal bacteria regulate our innate immune system. This surprising discovery could make it possible to treat diseases related to inflammation, such as diabetes and colitis, with a cocktail of good bacteria. Publication in…