This article discusses the coevolution of several species of the tribe Phyllantheae and moths of the genus Epicephala.

Child homicide is a phenomenon that not infrequently leads to shock and societal unrest. However, the precise nature and scope of child homicide in the Netherlands remains unknown.

The Netherlands is losing plant species that rely on pollination by insects. Leiden environmental scientist Kaixuan Pan demonstrates this after analysing 87 years of measurements from over 365,000 plots. The news is alarming for our biodiversity and food security. ‘75 per cent of our crops and 90% of…

Two bacterial species team up inside the plant root system to rescue their host from fungal infection. This was discovered by a team of microbiologists and bioinformaticians from the Netherlands Institute of Ecology, Wageningen University, and the Institute of Biology Leiden. They also identified the…

Just like every other organism on Earth, plants’ ultimate goal is to survive and reproduce. In order to achieve this, they must make trade-offs between where and how to allocate their finite set of resources. Whether they put their resources and energy into their growth, reproduction or maintenance,…

This thesis describes how complex and real-world relevant analytical solutions can be found starting from a simple Nagumo problem posed on one or two-dimensional lattices.

The Metabolomics Facility of the University of Leiden has brought together two research groups from the Faculty of Science that are well-known for their expertise in two different fields: the Biomedical Metabolomics Facility Leiden, experts in clinical metabolomics and the Natural Products Laboratory,…

Publication of Johann Natterer's (1787-1843) word lists of Amazonian languages.

Beautiful microscopic specimens play the leading role in the course 'Biodiversity Plant' for first-year Biology students. Normally these are put back in storage right after the course. But not this year!

The Plants & Planets exhibition brings two worlds together in a dazzling mix of science, nature and art. It opens at Old Observatory Leiden and Hortus botanicus on 7 February.

That a switching protein plays a role in protecting a plant from too much sunlight was already known, but how exactly was not yet understood. The research group of Anjali Pandit has now discovered that this protein changes shape when there is too much sunlight. The results have been published in Nature…

The MicroSOS project is designed to bring together academic and industrial partners with different expertises to address challenges that agriculture is facing due to climate change and invests in the development of microbiome-based solutions towards more sustainable agricultural practices.

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

Local residents, scientists and students are investigating riverbanks in Leiden for the 'Bank Plants' citizen science project. Which plant species are found where? And how can the municipality of Leiden improve its riverbank management to ensure optimal biodiversity?

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.

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

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

Lecture

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

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.

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. ‘Play’ is an activity linked to change, serious even when frivolous, potentially transgressive even when rule-bound. Play intersects…

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

‘What I find most alluring about soil life is that you can steer it,’ researcher Martijn Bezemer of the Institute Biology Leiden (IBL) reveals. ‘You can ask: What do you want? And then I can transform the soil into something you need. At least, that is what we thought.’

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?

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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).

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

Plant biologist Pingtao Ding, assistant professor at the Institute of Biology Leiden (IBL), has received a 2.4 million European grant from the European Research Council (ERC). This ERC Starting Grant for promising young researchers allows him to unravel the molecular mechanisms by which plants resist…

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

Just like us, plants also produce growth hormones, and they also go through an ageing process. The study of the genes and mechanisms behind these processes is useful not only for crop breeding and agriculture, but also for medical research. That is the view held by Professor of Plant Developmental Genetics…

A special relationship between plants and fungi, which plays an important role in carbon storage in soil, has the potential to slow down climate change. However, the amount of carbon stored in soil is decreasing as a result of human activity. This is what researchers say in a publication in Nature Communications.…

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…

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…

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.