Bioactive Molecules is one of the four research themes of the Institute of Biology Leiden.

Can the venom of snakes, scorpions and other animals be sources of new antibiotics?

Can we establish a new quality control system for herbal medicines that is based on bioactivity rather than a few abundant chemicals?

Lecture

Microbial Sciences' contribution to the Bioactive Molecules research theme is to discover new bioactive molecules and enzymes and unravel their mechanisms of action, regulatory networks, and the (bio)synthetic pathways required for their production.

Plant Sciences' contribution to the Bioactive Molecules research theme is to identify new plant bioactive molecules, and unravel their mechanisms of action in plant development or health, and the regulatory networks and (bio)synthetic pathways required for their production.

How and why latex bearing plants select specific chemical compounds for eco-chemical interactions with its biotic factors?

Animal Sciences’ contribution to the Bioactive Molecules research theme includes research on molecules from natural sources, such as plants, insects, and snake venom, with the aim to identify novel anti-cancer, anti-inflammatory, anti-microbial, and anti-diabetic agents.

Promotor: A.P.IJzerman Co-promotor: A. Bender

Source: J Cheminform, Volume 7, Issue 1 (2015)

An integrated approach for the simultaneous prediction of polypharmacology and binding affinity/potency of small molecules.

Promotor: Prof.dr. R. Verpoorte, , Co-Promotor: Young Hae Choi

How can zebrafish models be used to gain a better understanding of host-pathogen interaction mechanisms and to screen new drugs for infectious disease treatment?

The largest genus within the Phyllanthaceae family is a group called Phyllanthus L. Recent studies have shown, that Phyllanthus is paraphyletic with the genera Glochidion, Breynia and Synostemon nested within it.

Can the (industrial) herbal extraction process be mathematically described and can this model be used to optimize the extraction in terms of quality and economical parameters?

How to identify patients at risk of developing devastating, metastatic disease and facilitate the development of personalised treatment for prostate cancer patients?

We strive to address the challenge of constructing a modeling language to write software which can take advantage of recent hardware developments (multicore, cloud) without compromising in its abstraction levels.

Can we make a better vancomycin?

Promotor: Roeland M.H. Merks

Can zebrafish larvae be used as a behavioural model for screening natural products as potential neurotropic drugs?

Natural product inspired antibiotics to address resistance

We aim to develop A. niger strains that produce more starch degrading enzymes even in the absence of starch.

Can new variants of daptomycin and the polymyxins be found?

Existing work in probabilistic language modeling can be mostly divided into two categories:

Epithelial-mesenchymal plasticity (EMP) and tumor cell migration play an important role in cancer progression, and an improved understanding of the mechanisms underlying these concepts is essential for developing new targeted approaches.

Description of Biotic ligand models: making an inventory of available models & assessment of the variability of the predicted HC5 using the BLMs in different Dutch water types (2005 - 2007)

Mathematical models of software systems enable characterizations, abstractions, simulations, and analysis of complex software during its development.

- How to deconvolute metabolic mixture of precursors and products by biontransformation? - How to optimize the reaction conditions to produce bioactive compounds in biotransformation? - What is the effect of co-treating fungi or bacteria for biotransformations?

Real-life processes are characterized by dynamics involving time. Examples are walking, sleeping, disease progress in medical treatment, and events in a workflow.

Promotor: Prof.dr. E. Deprettere

How can we find novel natural products from Actinomycetes that act as growth modulators on mammalian cells? Can we harvest and develop the potential of these novel compounds for industrial and medical biotechnology?

Main challenges in skin vaccination are overcoming the stratum corneum (SC) barrier and targeting the antigen presenting cells (APC) in the epidermis and the dermis.

Promotores: Prof.dr. P.C.W. Hogendoorn & Prof.dr. H.P. Spaink, Co-promotor: Dr. B.E. Snaar-Jagalska

The research is aimed at development of an efficient gene targeting method that allows controlled integration of DNA at a preselected site in the Trichoderma genome.

Can we develop new enzymes and cell factories to upgrade current enzyme cocktails towards complete degradation of biomass?

Death in all types of melanomas is generally caused by metastasis. Uveal melanoma (UM) is the most common intraocular melanoma, there are currently no (patient-derived) animal models that faithfully recapitulate metastatic dissemination of UM.

This dissertation studies the Asymptotics of Bayesian nonparametric inference for Gaussian linear models.

Immunotherapies for cancer are an emerging class of therapeutic strategies which aim to treat cancer via augmentation of the immune system.

Industrial manufacturing processes, such as the production of steel or the stamping of car body parts, are complex semi-batch processes with many process steps, machine parameters and quality indicators.

Clinical development of drugs for central nervous system (CNS) disorders has been particularly challenging and still suffers from high attrition rates.

This project aims to further understand the molecular details related to the biosynthesis and function of Galf containing glycoconjugates in fungal Aspergillus spp.

The molecular mechanisms that instigate a healthy cell to become malignant are fueled by (epi)genetic alterations in so-called driver genes.

This dissertation focuses on developing new mathematical and statistical methods to properly represent time-varying covariates and model them within the context of time-to-event analysis.

Promotor: Prof.dr. F.S. de Boer, Co-promotor: D. Clarke

Promotor: Prof.dr. B. van de Water, Co-promotores: L.T.M. van der Ven, A.S. Kienhuis

Systems pharmacology aims to apply techniques from systems biology to pharmacological models.

Making a dynamic substance stock model in order to conduct scenario analyses and make forecasts.

An integrated approach of physiological concepts, advanced statistical approaches and large clinical datasets.

Promotor: Prof.dr. B. van de Water, Co-promotor: L.S. Price

Peter Grunwald