The INTERACT project strive to unlock the enormous biotechnological potential of microbes, leading to sustainable crop productions systems.

Let’s get this out of the way: Hillary Clinton won the 26 September 2016 presidential candidates television debate. Handily.

Aspergillus niger is an important industrial producer of organic acids and enzymes producing large amounts of spent fungal biomass.

Mycorrhizas are symbiotic associations between soil fungi and most plant species.

Harvesting rice from the same field, without planting new rice plants? A discovery may bring this scenario closer. Leiden scientists have discovered a gene that allows annual plants to grow after flowering, instead of dying. Publication on 13 April in Nature Plants.

WORLDING AMERICA researches how ‘play’ has been a key force in the past and present process of creating America as a coherent and hegemonic ‘world,’ from 1503 to the present.

Although plant domestication has significantly altered crop genetics and phenotypes, its effects on the taxonomic and functional diversity of plant-associated microbiomes are not well understood.

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

Producing offspring of a crop without sowing and that is even bigger than the parent plant. According to Leiden researchers this can be achieved by overstimulating a single gene that rejuvenates cells, including bringing them back to the embryonic phase.

All kinds of reasons have been put forward for why plants apparently fail to make maximum use of the available light. None of these reasons can explain why after two billion years of evolution they are not black, like industrial photovoltaic solar cells. Are we missing something?

Around 1.8 million years ago, early hominins moved into Eurasia and adapted to colder climates and unfamiliar ecosystems. This project investigates whether innovations in diet such as eating new plants or applying new techniques for food processing (cooking or fermentation) contributed to this major…

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As a contribution to the changing legislation and evolving societal attitudes concerning environmental issues, this project aims to enhance and manipulate the plants’ own natural defense mechanisms against western flower thrips (WFT).

This doctoral project by artist and educator Luiz Zanotello engenders a postcolonial understanding of time, space and movement by means of artistic research methods. The project examines the contradictory effects of the abyssal line of thought within the tropics as a starting point.

Promotor: Erik F. Smets, Co-promotores: Barbara Gravendeel, Niels Raes

Promotor: P.G.L. Klinkhamer, Co-Promotores: K. Vrieling, P.P.J. Mulder

Plants love favourable microbes such as bacteria and fungi: they grow better and become healthier. Jos Raaijmakers, Professor of Microbial Ecology, is in search of the right microbes to be used in agriculture. Inaugural lecture 13 November.

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…

Deepfakes are videos that have been manipulated to replace one person’s likeness with that of another. They can be difficult to distinguish from authentic videos. In our study, we found that people who score high on conspiracy thinking and people who use social media more are better at distinguishing…

A plant that takes metal from the ground all by itself: a natural way to mine or to clean the soil. PhD student Roderick Bouman (Hortus Botanicus Leiden) described a new plant species from Sabah, Borneo, which can be used to extract nickel. In an open access article in Botanical studies, he and the…

Work officially started on Schilperoortpark at the Leiden Bio Science Park on Wednesday 6 March. Town councillor Paul Dirkse and Vice-Chancellor of the Executive Board of the University Martijn Ridderbos planted the first tree together with Cas Schilperoort, grandson of Professor Rob Schilperoort, the…

Fluctuations in individual plant communities contribute to the stability of an ecosystem as a whole, a study published in Ecology Letters shows. Nadia Soudzilovskaia and colleagues for the first time used data from plant communities across five continents to prove this hypothesis.

Emeritus Professor Ben Lugtenberg edited a book on “Principles of Plant-Microbe Interactions” together with Paul Hooykaas, Eddy van der Meijden and Jos Raaijmakers, all from the IBL.

Plants are able to resist a pathogen’s attack by a dual innate immune system. The relationship between the two pathways was not clear, but it turns out that they mutually potentiate each other, as assistant professor Pingtao Ding (Institute of Biology Leiden) and colleagues (The Sainsbury Laboratory,…

There is much wrong with the taxonomy of the plant genus Phyllanthus. Roderick Bouman of the Hortus botanicus Leiden has developed a new phylogeny for Phyllanthus and exposes the evolution of the plant genus. Publication in TAXON.

Our annual "Science to Experience" exhibition of student works is hosted by the V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media. This year's theme is "TIME".

Students at Leiden University College (LUC) gain an understanding of journalism ‘from the inside out’ through innovative teaching methods in the courses Multimedia Journalism, Investigative Journalism and Gender, Media and Conflict. By simulating the actual daily tasks of journalists, they are exposed…

Neanderthals in cold regions probably ate a lot more vegetable food than was previously thought. This is what archaeologist Robert Power has discovered based on new research on ancient Neanderthal dental plaque. PhD defence 1 November.

The authors delve into the varying degrees to which institutions across different nations connect foreign events to their respective country's domestic affairs.

Associate professor at the Natural Products Laboratory, Institute of Biology, Leiden University - the Netherlands

The Sundanese people, the largest ethnic group in West Java, have been using traditional medicine for a long time. Known as ubar kampung, Sundanese indigenous knowledge, beliefs and practices of traditional medicine are based on local people’s knowledge and use of Medicinal, Aromatic, and Cosmetic (MAC)…

Microbes influence and respond to other organisms. This theme explores the dynamic relationships within plant and animal microbiomes, and the immune responses that govern host defense. Using model systems such as zebrafish, insects, and plants, we investigate fundamental processes and engineer microbes…

Imagining Urban Complexity introduces passionate and critical perspectives on the link between the humanities and urban studies.

How does the development of digital technologies impact society, and law/regulation within that society?

Exploring cultural production in Europe, Latin America and Africa, the institute’s research programme focuses on the continuous interconnectedness of the Arts and Society in both the textual culture of literature, learning and public debate and the visual culture of art, architecture, film, photography…

Television presenter and journalist Twan Huys will be a lecturer in Journalism and New Media at Leiden University from 1 September 2024.

The different kinds of cultural perspectives on health and disease of the participants are related to their knowledge, beliefs, values and practices manifested in various forms of lifestyle in Indonesia. The cultural diversity of the population is also related to differences in health behaviour.

Leiden biologists have shown that a gene present in plants, animals and yeasts does play an important role in plants, although for years the gene was considered unimportant. It turns out the gene plays a crucial role in the development of vascular tissue in plants. Publication in Nature Plants on 11…

Sophie Ernst’s doctoral thesis is an artist’s contribution to media art theory.

A wide range of plant species is essential to our earth because of the different materials and foods these plants provide. But plant diversity has decreased drastically in recent decades. PhD candidate Kaixuan Pan explains what we can do to increase it once again.

The Global Strategy for Plant Conservation, a world-wide effort by the botanist and plant protection community, is making considerable progress in protecting plant diversity around the world, a new report says. The Hortus botanicus Leiden is one of the partners of the project.

A collaboration between the IBL and LUMC has resulted in the discovery that the polymerase theta enzyme is essential for the integration of Agrobacterium T-DNA into the genome of plants. The finding means a break-through for the development of more efficient systems for targeted genome modification…

Plants that are pollinated by fewer species of animal may be less vulnerable to change than was thought. This is what Saskia Klumpers discovered in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. She will be awarded a PhD on 15 December.

Leiden researchers have compiled information collected by scientists over the past 120 years into a database of plant-fungal interactions. This important biological data is now freely available for researchers and nature conservationists. Publication in New Phytologist.

On 11 January 2019, Maastricht University and the University of Groningen hosted a workshop on the regulation of social media influencers.