On the 11th of January, Rasmus Puggaard-Rode successfully defended a doctoral thesis. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Rasmus on this achievement!

Does Artifical Light at Night (ALAN) disrupt seasonal physiological and behavioral patterns in migrating freshwater fish?

Viral hemorrhagic fever (VHF) is a group of acute diseases caused by highly infectious viruses including Ebola, Lassa, Dengue viruses. Its high mortality rate poses high risk to public health, however, studies on VHF have been hampered due to the non-availability of proper models and incomplete knowledge…

Developing new methods for performing improvised music

The goal of this study is to systematically investigate how intonation (speech melody) is conveyed in whispered speech.

The effects of anthropogenic noise on interactions between predators and their prey are still little understood.

What are the precise identities, possibilities and current practice examples of the various time frames in music and what bearings do they have individually and in combinations on the speed of the music?

A British English Pronunciation Course Book

Behavioural biologist Wouter Halfwerk has been awarded a 2-year outgoing Rubicon-grant from NWO. He will be working at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute with bats and frogs to understand the evolution of multimodal communication.

In this research group, headed by Bob Van de Water, cell signaling programs that underlie adverse drug reactions as well as cancer development and progression are unraveled. Adverse drug reactions involve cell injury in critical target organ cells which leads to the activation of cellular stress response…

Institute of Biology Leiden (IBL) is an internationally oriented institute for research and education in biology. We are part of the Faculty of Science at Leiden University.

Promotor: J.M. Memelink

The research described in this thesis combines the latest insights in lysosomal function with lysosome centred cell signalling.

Promotor: B. van de Water

Physics and Engineering Approaches to Biomedicine and Pharmacology

Mashaghi lab conducts research at the interface of physics, engineering and biomedicine. We develop and use theoretical and experimental approaches to address basic and applied research problems.

Lecture, This Time for Africa!

This study investigates the perception and production of emotional prosody by native and non-native listeners and speakers, i.e. Chinese and Dutch listeners and speakers, including Dutch L2 learners of Chinese.

This project examines how speakers store and process regular pitch variation.

This dissertation provides a formal description of the relationship between diatopic/diachronic micro-variation and phonologization through analysis of the phonetic/phonological properties of unstressed vowel reduction and vowel insertion in two Northern Italian dialects.

Industrial ecologists Stefano Cucurachi and Flora Siebler are part of the new consortium PROGENY, which received 3.6 million euros from the European Commission. PROGENY is an exciting project that will study the possibilities of soap films for innovations, such as ultra-thin screens.

All languages use melody in speech, primarily via rises and falls of the pitch of voice. Such pitch variation is pervasive, offering a wide spectrum of nuance to sentences – an additional layer of meaning. For example, saying “yes” with a rising pitch implies a question (rather than an affirmation).…

Source: Mol Pharmacol, Volume 87, Issue 2, pp. 305-13 (2015)

We focus on a better understanding of the mechanisms of cancer drug resistance and metastasis.

Stimulating the vagus nerve, which provides a direct link between the gut and brain, makes people pay less attention to sad facial expressions. This research study by psychologists Katerina Johnson and Laura Steenbergen is published in the journal Neuroscience, and made it to the cover.

In this article, Thijs van Dooremalen and Philip Smith investigate how public discourse of heatwaves have shifted in British newspaper discourse, drawing on Raymond Williams’s theory of dominant, emergent, and residual cultural patterns to analyse changes in language and interpretation over recent d…

In this thesis, a system pharmacology approach, integrating metabolomics, pharmacology and chemical biology, was applied to understand and modulate the endocannabinoid system across different model systems (cells, zebrafish, mice and humans).

The main aim of this thesis was to unravel the signaling and regulatory networks that drive tumor cell migration during breast cancer metastasis.

Promotor: M. de Jong, Co-Promotor: Samtleben

To increase clinical success rate of drugs, a better understanding of drug action mechanism and disease dynamics is required. Metabolomics, which studies small molecules involved in biochemical processes in organisms, has shown to be a useful tool for this better understanding.

The type-IV secretion system (T4SS) is a machinery able to transfer DNA and proteins between bacteria and in certain cases also to eukaryotic cells.

Prostate cancer (PCa) is one of the most prevalent cancer in males.

The experiments described in this thesis employ local lentiviral knockdowns in brain areas of female zebra finches followed by behavioural assays consisting of preference and Go/Nogo tasks.

For centuries astronomers studied the Universe by collecting light. Nowadays, we are living in times of great technological advancements, which allow us to explore our Universe in a new way - though gravitational wave radiation.

This thesis describes the development and optimization of the first molecular tools to study the enzyme PLA2G4E.

Animal Sciences’ contributions to the Host-Microbe Interactions research theme focus on the interaction of animal hosts with pathogenic microbes but also the beneficial role of the gut microbiome.

In this thesis, we describe the latest advances in SQUID-detected Magnetic Resonance Force Microscopy (MRFM).

Promotor: T. Schmidt, Co-Promotor: B.E. Snaar-Jagalska

The Co-Align Conference 2023 will be held on 16 May 2023 at Leiden University.

A deceptively simple, complicated paper

Plants produce an astonishing variety of secondary metabolites (SMs) which are thought to play vital roles in the fitness of plants through ecological interactions.

Promotor: A.P. IJzerman

Promotor: A.P. IJzerman

Nature, nurture and neural mechanisms of social emotion regulation in childhood

Source: Biosens Bioelectron, Volume 74, pp. 233-42 (2015)

Key publications of the Cancer Drug Target Discovery group

The soil ecosystem consists of the largest reservoir of biodiversity on Earth.