In the past decade many population studies have been performed with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to understand the bulk properties of protoplanetary disks around young stars. These population studies mostly consisted of low mass stars, with relatively few of the disks around…

The idea of citizens and public professionals collaborating to provide public services has widely spread in several countries around the globe. Co-production is often presented as the go-to solution for challenges like a legitimacy crisis of both the government and the market, and financial concerns.…

This thesis describes the importance of being able to control the selectivity of potential drug candidates.

Neuraminidases are enzymes that cleave glycosidic linkages of sialic acid. These enzymes are involved in influenza infections as well as in many cellular processes in mammals and micro-organisms.

Promotor: J. Schaye

Promotor: G.A. van der Marel, Co-promotor: D.C. Codée

Promotor: J.P. Abrahams, Co-promotor: T. Grüne

Algoritmen ontwerpen is een van de onderzoeksonderwerpen waar Leiden sterk in is. Want supercomputers moeten niet alleen gebouwd worden, maar ook geprogrammeerd. Wetenschappers van internationale faam doen hier onderzoek naar.

Voor het eerst hebben onderzoekers uit Utrecht, Leiden, Amsterdam, Liverpool en Maastricht mini-orgaantjes van slangengifklieren in het lab gekweekt. De groepjes cellen kunnen gifmoleculen produceren. Dit is een belangrijke stap om slangenbeten beter te behandelen. Publicatie in toptijdschrift Cell…

Gouden nanodeeltjes vormen een nuttig hulpmiddel om enzymen en andere moleculen beter te begrijpen. Biswajit Pradhan, promovendus aan het Leiden Institute of Physics, gebruikt gouden nanostaafjes om individuele moleculen te bestuderen die op andere manieren lastig te detecteren zijn. De resulterende…

De European Physical Society heeft de prestigieuze Edison Volta Prize toegekend aan Leids natuurkundige Michel Orrit. De prijs wordt elke twee jaar uitgereikt aan een individu of groep van maximaal 3 wetenschappers ter erkenning van een buitengewone prestatie in natuurkundig onderzoek.

De keten die patiënten voorziet van nieuwe medicijnen, bestaat uit diverse complexe schakels: van fundamentele wetenschap, tot klinische tests, tot productie. Deze hele keten is aanwezig in Leiden. De Universiteit Leiden, het Leids Universitair Medisch Centrum (LUMC) en de bedrijven op het Leiden Bio…

Fundamental understanding of molecular reactions on metal surfaces is important for improving heterogeneous catalysis.

Promotores: H.S. Overkleeft, G.A. van der Marel, Co-Promotor: R.G. Boot

Promotie

Embryonische stamcellen hebben het opmerkelijke vermogen om zich door te ontwikkelen tot elk type cel. Tijdens hun metamorfose richting bijvoorbeeld een lever- of hartcel, moeten ze steeds weer kiezen tussen verschillende ontwikkelingspaden. Hoe ze deze beslissingen maken is grotendeels onbekend. Een…

Het stofje galantamine uit bloembollen kan symptomen van Alzheimer bestrijden. Nadeem Akram onderzocht hoe narcissen dit natuurlijke medicijn optimaal kunnen produceren. Promotie op 24 juni.

NWO heeft deze week bekendgemaakt dat Marcellus Ubbink (LIC) een ENW-Klein-subsidie ontvangt voor zijn onderzoek naar de rol van temperatuur in de evolutie van enzymen. In totaal zijn zestien subsidieaanvragen gehonoreerd.

De manier waarop genen zijn opgevouwen bepaalt hoe vaak ze tot uiting komen in ons lichaam. Leidse biofysici hebben nu als eerste deze structuur molecuul-voor-molecuul ontrafeld. Publicatie op 1 december in Nature’s Scientific Reports.

Galaxies in the local Universe fall into two main categories of spirals and ellipticals. In this Thesis, we explore the structural evolution of galaxies into this bimodal distribution.

Promotor: K. Kuijken, Co-Promotor: H. Hoekstra

Growth hormone profiles are pulsatile and highly variable between individuals, limiting the implementation of mathemathical models to quantify an individual's secretion.

Streptomyces are multicellular, Gram-positive bacteria in the phylum of actinobacteria which produce a high amount of bioactive natural products of which the expression is tightly coordinated with the life cycle.

Promotor: Prof.dr. E.F. van Dishoeck, Co-Promotor: M.R. Hogerheijde

Endothelial dysfunction and microvascular diseases are key drivers of cardiovascular disease, the world's leading cause of death.

The research described in this thesis focused on identifying novel drug targets and synergistic combinations for triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC), a virulent subtype of breast cancer with a dismal prognosis and limited therapeutic options.

The next generation of high-contrast imaging instruments on space-based observatories requires sophisticated wavefront sensing and control in addition to a high-performance coronagraph.

Cathodic corrosion is a relatively unknown phenomenon that can severely etch metallic electrodes at cathodic (negative) potentials.

For optimization problems, it is often unclear how to choose the most appropriate optimization algorithm. As such, rigorous benchmarking practices are critical to ensure we can gain as much insight into the strengths and weaknesses of these types of algorithms.

Promotor: J. N. Kok, Co-promotor: A. J. Knobbe

At the moment, over 350.000 chemicals are registered worldwide for production and use. Their application, however, may harm human health and the environment.

Scattering of light in the presence of nano-structured materials, i.e. with features in the order of the wavelength of the light or smaller, reveals details of how light interacts with matter at the nanoscale.

Promotor: Prof.dr. J. Kuiper

Promotor: Christoph U. Keller, Co-promotores: Matthew A. Kenworthy, Frans Snik

This thesis describes the role of pollution, specifically neonicotinoid insecticides, as an actor of the ongoing biodiversity decline.

Building a Deep Cross-media Transfer Network to extract visual relations that relieve the problem of insufficient training data for visual tasks.

Promotor: Prof.dr. J.P. Abrahams, Co-Promotor: N.S. Pannu

Particles are omnipresent in biopharmaceutical products. In protein-based therapeutics such particles are generally associated with impurities, either derived from the drug product itself (e.g. protein aggregates), or from extrinsic contaminations (e.g. cellulose fibers).

Atherosclerosis is the most prominent underlying pathology of cardiovascular disease and an important cause of major adverse cardiovascular events.

Interactive exploration of large volumes of data is increasingly common, as data scientists attempt to extract interesting information from large opaque data sets. This scenario presents a difficult challenge for traditional database systems, as (1) nothing is known about the query workload in advance,…

Promotor: Prof.dr. G.R. de Snoo

This thesis aims to investigate the effect of tripartite interaction between microbial inoculants, the plant, and herbivore insects on the rhizosphere microbiome and volatilome. We investigated the rhizosphere microbiome and volatilome of tomato plants exposed to insect herbivory and/or inoculated with…

All crested and marbled newts (the genus Triturus) suffer from an unusual genetic abnormality, called a balanced lethal system, that kills exactly half of their offspring. How can a trait so disadvantageous have survived millions of years of natural selection?

Promotor: Prof.dr. M. Danhof, Co-Promotor: J. de Jongh

In a typical glycosylation reaction, a donor is activated to form a (variety of) electrophilic species which can react with a nucleophilic acceptor, following a reaction mechanism having both SN1 and SN2 character.

This thesis describes the design and development of subunit‐selective inhibitors of particular catalytically active subunits of human constitutive proteasomes and immunoproteasomes.

A key step in the synthesis of oligosaccharides and glycoconjugates is the formation of the glycosidic bond.

Promotor: W. Jiskoot, Co-promotor: H.A. Every

Promotor: J.W.M. Frenken

Over the last three decades, the discovery of exoplanets has revealed the boundless variety of worlds beyond our own Solar System⁠. Majority of planetary systems contain short-period planets that are larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune⁠.