What is the optimal design of sandy solutions for sustainable climate change adaption, from an ecological, biophysical and societal point of view?

Promotor: Prof.dr. A.G.G.M. Tielens

Promotor: M.T.M. Koper, Co-promotor: L. Juurlink

The work presented in this thesis is based on ALMA surveys of protoplanetary disks in three star-forming regions: Lupus, OMC-2, and NGC 2024.

A large diversity of exoplanetary systems has been found, but it is still unclear what drives this diversity.

Adenosine is an endogenous ligand which exerts its action by activating adenosine receptors (ARs), while its circulating levels are controlled via a variety of mechanism and proteins, amongst others the equilibrative nucleoside transporters (ENTs).

Taxonomy as a science has accumulated data and knowledge for more than 250 years.

Streptomyces are multicellular, Gram-positive bacteria in the phylum of actinobacteria which produce a high amount of bioactive natural products of which the expression is tightly coordinated with the life cycle.

The thesis is about how auxin and AGC kinases regulate male fertility. The main AGC kinases studied in this thesis is PDK1, PDK2 and AGC1.5, AGC1.7.

Global healthcare is on the verge of an antibiotic availability crisis as bacteria have evolved resistance to nearly all known antibacterials. Identifying new antibiotics that operate via novel modes-of-action is therefore of high priority.

Glucocorticoids are potent anti-inflammatory drugs widely used clinically to treat various inflammatory and immune conditions. However, two main clinical problems limit their use. GCs trigger severe side effects and they induce acquired glucocorticoid resistance, especially during chronic systemic treatment…

This thesis explores different avenues to develop insurmountable antagonists for CC Chemokine Receptors, such as CCR1, CCR2 and CCR5.

Planets are formed in disks of gas and dust around young stars.

Supervisor: S.F. Portegies Zwart Co-Supervisor: A.G.A. Brown

This thesis aims to improve the detection from ultra-weak single emitter by enhancing their emission properties with plasmonic nanostructures. We exploit the wet-chemically synthesized single crystalline gold nanorods (GNRs) as our basic frameworks in the whole studies, simply because of their unique…

Inactivating mutations in BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes predispose to several types of cancer.

Drug induced organ toxicity is the main problem of the drug development and drug usage in the clinic. The liver and kidneys are the most sensitive organs towards drug induced toxicity.

Promotor: J.A. van Veen, Co-promotor: E.E. Kuramae

To address the fundamental questions of how life on Earth emerged and how common life may be in the Universe, it is crucial to know the chemical composition of the planet-forming material.

Source: Structure , Volume 22, Issue 8, pp. 1120-1139 (2014)

Bacterial biocatalysis constitutes a sustainable alternative for high-value chemicals production by enabling the utilization of renewable feedstocks.

We study the interplay of topology and geometry with chirality for several passive and active systems, employing both analytical and numerical methods.

This thesis investigates reactive interfaces in surface science across three domains: heterogeneous catalysis, environmental nanoplastics, and two-dimensional materials.

Solar energy harnessed by plants and algae has great potential to be converted into biofuels for future generations.

Novel entities may pose risks to humans and the environment. The small particle size and relatively large surface area of micro- and nanoparticles (MNPs) make them capable of adsorbing other novel entities, leading to the formation of aggregated contamination.

This thesis addresses the chemical processes that determine the compositions of giant planet atmospheres.

In this thesis unconventional tools based on fluidic interfaces were developed to study the surface and interfacial chemistry of graphene, to characterize the intrinsic properties of graphene, to disentangle the effects of substrate and of the environmental factors, and to improve handling protocols…

Streptomyces are filamentous bacteria that produce more than two-thirds of known antibiotics.

Promotor: Prof.dr. A. P. IJzerman, Co-Promotor: L.H. Heitman

Promotor: Prof.dr. I.A.G. Snellen, C.U. Keller

The aromatic infrared bands (AIBs) seen throughout the interstellar medium (ISM) are generally thought to be carried by polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and their nitrogen analogues (PANHs).

Multiple stars, that is two or more stars composing a gravitationally bound system, are common in the universe.

Self-assembly is an abundant process in nature and is vital to many processes in living organisms.

The lipids in the uppermost layer of the skin, the stratum corneum (SC), play an important role in the skin barrier function. The three main SC lipid classes are ceramides (CER), cholesterol and free fatty acids.

Until the 1990s, the only known planets were those in our Solar System. Three decades later, several thousand exoplanets have been discovered orbiting stars other than the Sun, and substantial efforts have been made to explore these strange new worlds through spectroscopic analyses of their atmosphe…

The chemical and structural heterogeneity of toxoid vaccines makes their analysis challenging. However, detailed insights on a molecular level can be obtained by mass spectrometry.

The sequence-dependence of biomolecular interactions involving nucleic acids and proteins is essential for numerous processes inside the cell. Insights into the underlying molecular mechanisms have been obtained using various biochemical and biophysical methods on two different levels — bulk and sin…

Promotor: P. J. J. Hooykaas, Co-promotor: R. Offringa

Inflammatory skin diseases such as psoriasis and atopic dermatitis can severely impact both the physical and social aspect of a patient’s life. Aberrant inflammatory responses are thought to be a major causative factor in these disorders, but an abundance of different factors contribute to the development…

In my research, I used a comparative wood anatomical approach to address wood evolution of the (largely) tropical flowering plant families Apocynaceae and Sapotaceae.

Promotor: H.S. Overkleeft, Co-promotor: M. van der Stelt

The PID-directed shift in PIN polarity has been broadly accepted as one of the essential mechanisms for the regulation of auxin transport polarity.

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One of the main challenges in the development of an effective anti-cancer vaccine is the generation of an adequate and directed cellular immune response.

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

This thesis tackles the difficulty of predicting the liver’s clinical response to novel therapies, a challenge arising from interspecies differences and limitations of existing in vitro models.

Bacteriophages, or phages for short, are the most abundant biological entity in nature. They shape bacterial communities and are a major driving force in bacterial evolution.

The studies presented in the work show the potential of the integrative use of biophysical data in defining the structural basis of protein interactions.

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