Category: news

…who joins the group for his master thesis. In close cooperation with the Laboratory of Microbiology, he is going to set up super-resolution microscopy in live bacteria.

…who joins the group to pursue his PhD thesis. He is going to study DNA polymerases interacting with DNA by employing single-molecule FRET techniques. He graduated in Molecular Life Sciences here at Wageningen University.

…who join the group for their Bachelor thesis. In close cooperation with the Laboratory of Biochemistry, we are going to look into Arabidopsis lines that express transcriptional regulators (Stef van der Krieken, project with Prof. Dr. Dolf Weijers) and plasma membrane steroid receptors (Stefan Hutten, project with Prof. Dr. Sacco de Vries).

A big welcome to Shazia Farouq (PhD student in the van Amerongen group)! Shazia will take over some of Andy’s projects, who left the group to pursue new endeavours. Thanks to Andy’s work in the last three months, we are now able to detect single fluorescent molecules on our microscope. Hooray!

Picture: Doubly labelled DNA (dyes: Cy3B and ATTO647N) immobilised on a glass surface. The green detection channel is on the left, red detection channel (FRET channel) on the right.

After finishing very late yesterday evening, we proudly present our first image taken with the new setup. Nothing very interesting, just some aggregated, fluorescent latex-beads on a cover slip surface imaged into blue, green and red detection channels of an emCCD camera (after excitation with a green laser). A big thank you goes to John for the laser control software!

Now its time to prepare some buffers, get the oxygen scavenger system working, and image some DNA FRET standards.

After a short flight from Heathrow to Schiphol and some trains and buses later, Andy and I arrived in Wageningen with all our luggage and cardboard-wrapped bikes. On Monday, we had fun opening the boxes from Thorlabs with parts for our new multi-colour TIRF microscope. Opinions on how soon we will be able to detect single, fluorescent molecules seem to differ quite a bit and a couple of bets have been placed, but we accept the challenge and are hoping to share some images in a few weeks time (and collect our winnings).

Good news: I accepted an offer for a position in the Laboratory of Biophysics in Wageningen (NL). Starting in Autumn 2012, my group is going to employ single-molecule methods, such as single‐molecule FRET and super‐resolution microscopy, to study biological processes on the molecular level.

We will study DNA-Protein interactions with a focus on DNA replication and repair. Besides continuing work on the bacterial DNA polymerase I (Klenow Fragment),  we will start investigating the human base excision repair pathway (BER), a cellular mechanism responsible for the repair of damaged sites in DNA.

If you are interested in joining the group as a Bachelor-, Master- or PhD-student, don’t hesitate to contact me for more information!