Honours and Minor Thesis projects

Climate change will affect us all, and we have to do everything we can to minimize the magnitude of change. Investments in renewable generation help to reduce the impact of energy usage on the supply side, but that will not get us all the way there, especially in the near term. Consumers will also have to become much more efficient with their energy use.

A major challenge in cancer therapeutics is to kill tumour cells without harming normal cells in the body. Traditional chemotherapy tries to do this by killing cells that are fast dividing, a characteristic hallmark of cancer cells, however as many other cells in the body are also fast dividing – such as those in the hair and the gut – chemotherapy typically results in undesirable side effects. Newer targeted therapies are designed to specifically target cancer cells, by exploiting the genetic changes that distinguish tumour cells from normal cells.…

Activity and movement are fundamental diagnostic parameters of animal behaviour. However, measuring long-term individual movement within groups was not possible until recently. Our ActivityMonitor provides accurate individual movement data in a fully automated way. This is a unique solution for the 24/7 long-term tracking of individual animals living in groups, which utilises an array of RFID readers positioned under the home cage of rats and mice that are implanted with RFID transponders.

Bacteria can live in almost all possible environments on earth. In general, they contribute to the stability and health of ecosystems and are very beneficial. However, some bacteria when in contact with humans can cause diseases. Despite the efforts to control them using antimicrobial agents, some of these bacteria have developed resistance and impose a threat to public health. The ability to resist antimicrobial agents lies on the genetic content of these bacteria, in their genes.

Despite enormous progress in research, cancer remains a devastating disease worldwide. Since generally not all patients will respond to a specific therapy, a great challenge in cancer treatment is the ability to predict which patients would benefit (or not) to a therapy of choice. This helps improve treatment efficacy and minimise unnecessary sufferings by non-responders. There is thus a pressing need to identify robust biomarkers (i.e. genes/proteins) that can accurately predict the right patients for the right drugs.…

Multidrug resistance (MDR) poses critical challenges to global health. In 2017 the World Health Organization identified Acinetobacter baumannii, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Enterobacteriaceae as the top-priority pathogens that urgently require development of novel therapeutic options. Recently, bacteriophage therapy has attracted extensive attention owing to its potential of being used as novel antimicrobials to combat MDR pathogens.

Lipids such as cholesterol or triglycerides are involved in a plethora of medical disorders and diseases ranging from cardiovascular diseases (including obesity and artherosclerosis) to neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson’s disease. An in-depth analysis of individual lipid classes and species is often indispensable to unravel the mechanisms underlying disease onset and progression.

Neuroscience is becoming an exciting and multidisciplinary field, with a combination of biology, psychology, engineering, and large-data processing. This project is suitable for those who are motivated to apply data-processing skills to biological questions. Our research projects investigate how neural circuits in the mouse brain work during a behavioural task; we visualise neural activity in vivo using advance fluorescent microscopy (two-photon imaging), while filming the behaviour of mice.

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) continues to evolve as a major threat to human health and new strategies are required for the treatment of AMR infections. Bacteriophages (phages) that kill bacterial pathogens are being identified for use in phage therapies, with the intention to apply these bactericidal viruses directly into the infection sites in bespoke phage cocktails. Using such a biological agent for infection control requires deep understanding of the phage.

This project focuses on the locomotion pattern of freely moving animals. The model organism we used is C. elegans, a transparent nematode about 1 mm, which displays a sinusoidal movement on the plates.