We are home to five research groups that share a mission to decipher biological principles in the context of animal development and tissue homeostasis. We also aim to train the next generation of developmental biologists through inspiring teaching at the level of bachelor, master, and PhD education in the biology department and Utrecht Life Sciences community. Learn more about our research or teaching through the links in the menu, or continue scrolling to read the latest news from our division.
Congratulations Saskia on being awarded the PhD supervisor of the year award by the PhD Council of the Graduate School of Life Sciences!
Our collaborative manuscript with Florian Geisler and the group of Rudolph Leube has just been published in eLife. Congratulations all! Read the paper here.
Saskia Suijkerbuijk received an Open Competition grant from the Dutch Research Council to investigate how cellular fitness is communicated in intestinal organoids.
Agathe Chaigne and Saskia Suijkerbuijk officially opened our brand new "Stem cells and Organoid" room! We are looking forward to loads of awesome experiments and happy culturing.
A very special welcome to our newest team additions: the mexican salamanders Axl and Lotte!
Exciting news: a Marie Curie Doctoral Network grant was awarded for the project SurfEx - Epithelial Exchange Surfaces: From organizing principles to ex vivo disease models of the gatekeepers of the body.
Five new members have joined our groups since the last website update! Welcome to Christian, Joren, Mohamed, Stefanos and Gwen.
In a collaborative effort with the Boxem, Ward, and Ruijtenberg labs, Jorian Sepers shows that the mIAA7 degron greatly improves auxin-mediated protein degradation in C. elegans. Plasmids to generate CRISPR repair templates are available from Addgene.
Read the paper hereSuzan Ruijtenberg and Mike Boxem both received an Open Competition grant from the Dutch Research Council for the single molecule visualization of translation dynamics and to investigate how epithelial cells organize themselves along an internal molecular compass. Congratulations both!
Sensitive similarity searches and structure prediction unearthed that MES-3 is a highly divergent ortholog of the canonical PRC2 component SUZ12.
Read the paper hereA warm welcome to Merel van Luyk as a new PhD student in the Suijkerbuijk group! We are happy you joined and wish you great success in your PhD.
Congratulations to Victoria Garcia on her paper describing the composition of the C. elegans Crumbs complex!
Read the paper hereCongratulations Jorian on the first paper in 2022! We show that ERM-1 phosphorylation and binding to NRFL-1 NHERF1/EBP50 redundantly control intestinal morphology.
Read the paper here