Projects

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a devastating, currently incurable brain disorder. In PD, specific nerve cells gradually die, causing tremor, slowness of movement, falls, dementia and many other problems. Why these nerve cells die, is not well understood. However, in rare familial cases PD is caused by genetic mutations that disrupt the function of the protein Parkin. Recently, it was discovered that Parkin is crucial to maintain a healthy pool ...

Neurodegenerative disorders, have a large impact on social and economic level; they affect quality of life to a large extent and create high financial burden for patients. Until now the only diagnosis for most of the neurodegenerative diseases is based on clinical symptoms, which occur when the disease is already advanced. Thus, available therapy for neurodegenerative disorders is unfortunately purely symptomatic. Therefore apart from ...

Neural insults and neurodegenerative diseases typically result in permanent functional deficits and represent a growing social and economic problem in our aging society. As the central nervous system of adult mammals only has a limited regenerative capacity, identifying cellular and molecular mechanisms that enable neuronal regeneration forms a critical step towards designing future pro-regenerative therapies. Within this project we aim to ...

Plants are our main food and feed source, but they often get threatened by adverse environments in which they must adapt to survive. These adverse environments due to (a)biotic factors cause major yield losses, that are expected to become worse due to climate change, raising the demand for stress tolerant crops. Mitochondria contain their own genome whose expression needs to be coordinated with the nuclear genome. This resulted in an ...

Blood vessel formation (angiogenesis) promotes tumor growth and metastasis. Current antiangiogenic therapies target endothelial growth factors, but suffer from limited efficacy. Also, since tumor vessels are structurally and functionally abnormal (which impairs perfusion), pruning them by anti-angiogenic therapy may create a more hostile nutrient-deprived milieu, promoting cancer cell escape and dissemination. A novel paradigm is to ...

Plants are usually regarded as U+201Cgreen factoriesU+201D that produce biomass and oxygen during the
process of photosynthesis. However, just like humans and animals, plants do breathe. Increasing evidence is pointing towards a crucial role for this process and the cellular organelles (mitochondria) where it occurs in stress responses. Mitochondria were once free-living bacteria that were taken by cells and even after millions of years ...