This minor focuses on the relationships between behaviour, health and illness.

A new research line is the development of liquid biopsy fingerprints to predict early Alzheimer’s disease (AD) stage in human in readily accessible body fluids in human (in collaboration with: Dr. Geert-Jan Groeneveld, CHDR; Prof. Elga de Vries, Free University Medical Center; and others).

Biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) for natural products are widespread in microbial genomes, and they are rapidly exchanged. This research assesses the factors that control the spread of BGCs and resistance genes in nature. This includes risk assessment for the spread of engineered DNA in nature.

Promotor: H.J.M. de Groot, Co-Promotor: A. Alia

An important hormone excreting gland in the human body is the pituitary

Promotor: J. van der Greef; Co-promotor: E. van Wijk, M. Wang

The Minor Computational Approaches to Disease, Signaling and Drug Targets (CADSDT) is focused on fundamental scientific research required for discovery of new drug targets and development of new drugs.

The ideas underlying this thesis are that lipidomics may improve the diagnosis of liver metabolic diseases, and can provide further insights into the underlying pathophysiology of these diseases.

Focus in skin research

Biophysicist Alireza Mashaghi and his collaborators are taking up the fight against muscular dystrophy: genetic disorders that cause muscle weakness. They want to inhibit the clumping of proteins that results in toxic aggregates. For this, the team receives 550,000 euros from Health Holland. The team…

Promotor: J. Kuiper

Accelerating the diagnosis and personalising the management of inherited metabolic diseases.

Utilization of plant-originated products as new antibiotics

On January 24 Professor Annemarie Meijer and Dr Sander Wezenberg received a NWO grant for their research. The grant was awarded within the Open Competition Domaine Science-M programme and is intended for innovative research areas that can form the basis for the research themes of the future.

The emergence of complex diseases resulting from abnormal cell-cell signaling and the spread of infectious diseases caused by pathogens are significant threats to humanity. Unraveling the dynamic mechanisms underlying cell-cell signaling and infectious disease spreading is crucial for effective disease…

Promotor: Prof.dr. J. Kuiper

To explore the potential of marine microorganisms as producers of novel antimicrobial agents and as bioprotectants in aqua- and agriculture, using an integrative, ecology-based strategy for bioprospecting.

We aim to provide new insights relating to the spectacular multi-cellular life cycle of streptomycetes and other actinobacteria.

PhD student Wen Yang discovered how certain cell receptors in E. coli bacteria signal 'smells'. With the use of ice-cold electron microscopy microbiologists from Leiden gain more insight into how bacteria respond to their environment. Publication in mBio.

Mathematical biologists from Leiden have developed a model that helps to explain how the spine and vertebrae, among other things, form during embryonic development. The same process, the other way around, plays a key role in cancer metastasis. Publication in iScience.

Why are mycobacteria such successful pathogens? And are there defence mechanisms in the body that help reduce an infection? To find out, Annemarie Meijer has been awarded the NWO Open Competition ENW-XL grant. She will not explore this quest alone. Five other leading Dutch research groups are participating…

How are the epidermal lipid pathways involved in health and disease.

Promotor: J. van der Greef, T. Hankemeier; Co-promotor: H.A. van Wietmarschen

Chronic inflammatory skin diseases such as psoriasis and atopic dermatitis affect both the physical and psychological well-being of millions of patients, leading to persistent symptoms like itchiness and sleeplessness. These conditions often result in decreased productivity and quality of life overall,…

The overall objective of this project is to identify novel drug candidates that are capable of slowing down the progression of neurodegeneration in the subset of Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients with overt mitochondrial dysfunction. Multimodal phenotypic characterisation of cohorts of monogenic PD…

In this thesis, we describe the potential of cell mechanical phenotyping for immune cell characterization, diagnosis, drug testing, as well as treatment of disease.

Can birds - like people- ‘see’ voices and learn how to sing by listening and watching?

Leiden University researchers and their collaborators report the development of new research frameworks that use day-to-day smartphone behavior gathered from a large sample of healthy people to help understand aging, and how aging alters with epilepsy and stroke. These reports occupy two back-to-back…

To make the right clinical decisions or develop effective diagnostic tests and treatments, it is important to understand the underlying mechanisms of a condition or behavior.

We aim to develop a drug-delivery method based on the production of biomolecules directly at the target site.

We know this, but we don’t act on it: eat healthily, move more, address our stress levels and sleep well. Internist and Professor of Diabetology Hanno Pijl is fascinated by the effect that a healthy lifestyle can have on health. He researches how this lifestyle is achievable and satisfying, for patients…

Iranian molecular plant biologist Salma Balazadeh started her career in Germany. Now she sets up a research group in Leiden to study stress in plants to secure global food supply. Her outlook on women in science in the context of the International Day for Women and Girls in Science, 11 February.

In this thesis, two potential therapeutic targets for diabetic nephropathy were dentified and investigated. First, we show that glomerular clusterin is upregulated in diabetic nephropathy and demonstrated that recombinant clusterin protein can protect the podocytes against oxidative stress in vitro.…

Can zebrafish provide a fast, sensitive in vivo vertebrate model for identifying novel mechanisms of Ewing sarcoma progression and for development of new anticancer compounds in a time- and cost-effective manner?

What is the function of the insect serosa?

Does the mineralocorticoid receptor play a role in the effects of cortisol and synthetic glucocorticoids on the immune response?

The skin is our natural barrier and lipids are a key part of this barrier. In the outer skin layer, the stratum corneum (SC), lipids form a densely organized structure dependent on the composition of these lipids.

Researchers need to work in specialized environments when they work with dangerous bacteria and viruses. These microbes spread easily, so only in labs with a high biosafety levels they can be studied. Unfortunately, to look at the microbes properly, expensive microscopes are needed that are not always…

What are the biological and biophysical mechanisms that control chemokine gradient sensing and migration of immune, endothelial, and tumour cells in tumour development?

Psychologist Bernadet Klaassens initiated a large fMRI study on the effect of drugs on brain networks in aging and Alzheimer's disease. It generated a unique data set and insight into a new method to develop drugs for patients with Alzheimer's.

PhD defence

What are key regulators of plant ageing that can reverse ageing in plants (rejuvenation), and how can we use this knowledge to improve crop plants?

Which brain cell does what, when Parkinson's disease arises? It won't be long before this jigsaw is solved piece by piece. Ahmed Mahfouz, computational biologist, combines bio-knowledge from Leiden with algorithms from Delft and is getting closer to finding the key.

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

How do macrophages and neutrophils contribute to metastatic onset?

How can novel bioimaging technologies and vertebrate model species be used to gain a better understanding of early cellular behaviours with the ultimate goal to increase our understanding of human development and disease processes?

The aim of this project is to explore the use of statistical interaction models to quantify cross-omics and omics-drug interactions in large-scale clinical and experimental datasets