Mission: The Environmental Biology department aims to increase the scientific understanding of how current and emerging anthropogenic threats affect biodiversity and ecosystem services. Through this understanding they facilitate strategic management of natural resources by addressing urgent challenges…

The Global Strategy for Plant Conservation, a world-wide effort by the botanist and plant protection community, is making considerable progress in protecting plant diversity around the world, a new report says. The Hortus botanicus Leiden is one of the partners of the project.

Plants, are sessile organisms, have developed strategies to adapt to changes in their environment, in part by altering their growth and development.

Social aspects of the learning environment, also called classroom climate, are important for students’ cognitive and affective learning outcomes. In this thesis the classroom climate is operationalised by means of two components: the teacher-class relationship and classroom discipline.

In Europe, archaeological traces of fire become more frequent between 300,000 and 400,000 years ago; but could the earliest occupants have survived without fire for at least half a million years before this? How could the early occupants of Europe have kept warm and processed meat without fire?

Plants can’t run away from enemies. Still, it would like to keep life-threatening herbivores at a distance. This can be done with odours. Klaas Vrieling of the Institute of Biology Leiden found out with his team how plants change odour production to keep the munchers at a distance.

The main question I want to answer is about the mutual influence between the cultural and settlements changes that occurred between the Bronze and the Early Iron Age in Margiana and the management of water resources.

Three at the same time: a ligation strategy combining tetrazine–norbornene cycloaddition, Staudinger–Bertozzi ligation, and copper(I)-catalyzed click reaction was used to label the three catalytic activities of the proteasome simultaneously in a single experiment. The orthogonality of the three ligation…

This thesis describes the development of improved formulations and alternative delivery strategies for polio vaccination.

In The Agency of Empire: Connections and Strategies in French Expansion (1686-1746) Elisabeth Heijmans places directors and their connections at the centre of the developments and operations of French overseas companies.

What is the culture of public engagement at research institutes (RIs) in the Netherlands and how does this compare to other countries?

Beautiful microscopic specimens play the leading role in the course 'Biodiversity Plant' for first-year Biology students. Normally these are put back in storage right after the course. But not this year!

This project aims to provide evidence-based knowledge on the conditions for successful anti-corruption activism in Ukraine.

Promotor: Prof.dr. T. Hankemeier, Co-promotor: R.J. Vreeken

Plants are able to resist a pathogen’s attack by a dual innate immune system. The relationship between the two pathways was not clear, but it turns out that they mutually potentiate each other, as assistant professor Pingtao Ding (Institute of Biology Leiden) and colleagues (The Sainsbury Laboratory,…

On 23 June 2020, Santy Kouwagam defended her PhD-thesis 'How lawyers win land conflicts for corporations: Legal Strategy and its influence on the Rule of Law in Indonesia'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof. A.W. Bedner and Prof. C.E. von Benda-Beckmann.

Harvesting rice from the same field, without planting new rice plants? A discovery may bring this scenario closer. Leiden scientists have discovered a gene that allows annual plants to grow after flowering, instead of dying. Publication on 13 April in Nature Plants.

Breeding for resistance becomes more and more important because we want to reduce the use of pesticides. A fast and cheap alternative can be to make use of morphological or chemical markers.

Local residents, scientists and students are investigating riverbanks in Leiden for the 'Bank Plants' citizen science project. Which plant species are found where? And how can the municipality of Leiden improve its riverbank management to ensure optimal biodiversity?

As a contribution to the changing legislation and evolving societal attitudes concerning environmental issues, this project aims to enhance and manipulate the plants’ own natural defense mechanisms against western flower thrips (WFT).

Promotores: G. Persoon, R. Schefold

Cytotoxic T-cells (CTLs) are involved in the clearance of viruses and killing of tumor cells.

In this thesis, we will utilize embryonic zebrafish tumour models to understand the interaction between engrafted human cancer cells and macrophages from the host, test drug administration modalities and anti-cancer efficacies of newly-developed PDT and PACT compounds, and test a light-triggered liposomal…

All kinds of reasons have been put forward for why plants apparently fail to make maximum use of the available light. None of these reasons can explain why after two billion years of evolution they are not black, like industrial photovoltaic solar cells. Are we missing something?

Producing offspring of a crop without sowing and that is even bigger than the parent plant. According to Leiden researchers this can be achieved by overstimulating a single gene that rejuvenates cells, including bringing them back to the embryonic phase.

On February 20th, Gulnaz Sibgatullina succesfully defended her doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Gulnaz on this great result.

CML report 192

Work officially started on Schilperoortpark at the Leiden Bio Science Park on Wednesday 6 March. Town councillor Paul Dirkse and Vice-Chancellor of the Executive Board of the University Martijn Ridderbos planted the first tree together with Cas Schilperoort, grandson of Professor Rob Schilperoort, the…

Which plants are depicted, described or collected in these century-old objects? Who made these objects, where and for what purpose? What is their scientific and societal relevance today?

Promotor: Erik F. Smets, Co-promotores: Barbara Gravendeel, Niels Raes

Just like us, plants also produce growth hormones, and they also go through an ageing process. The study of the genes and mechanisms behind these processes is useful not only for crop breeding and agriculture, but also for medical research. That is the view held by Professor of Plant Developmental Genetics…

For nine years he worked on the three-volume standard work Plant Galls of Europe. It yielded 2300 pages about 10,000 species of European galls, abnormal outgrowths in plants caused by parasites. Hans Roskam from the Institute of Biology Leiden: ‘The abundance of galls says something about the natural…

A special relationship between plants and fungi, which plays an important role in carbon storage in soil, has the potential to slow down climate change. However, the amount of carbon stored in soil is decreasing as a result of human activity. This is what researchers say in a publication in Nature Communications.…

A plant that takes metal from the ground all by itself: a natural way to mine or to clean the soil. PhD student Roderick Bouman (Hortus Botanicus Leiden) described a new plant species from Sabah, Borneo, which can be used to extract nickel. In an open access article in Botanical studies, he and the…

Fluctuations in individual plant communities contribute to the stability of an ecosystem as a whole, a study published in Ecology Letters shows. Nadia Soudzilovskaia and colleagues for the first time used data from plant communities across five continents to prove this hypothesis.

1. How does the social context influence emotion perception? 2. How do attentional control processes influence the unfolding of affective responses?

Plants love favourable microbes such as bacteria and fungi: they grow better and become healthier. Jos Raaijmakers, Professor of Microbial Ecology, is in search of the right microbes to be used in agriculture. Inaugural lecture 13 November.

Emeritus Professor Ben Lugtenberg edited a book on “Principles of Plant-Microbe Interactions” together with Paul Hooykaas, Eddy van der Meijden and Jos Raaijmakers, all from the IBL.

This monograph focuses on clustering of objects in high-dimensional data, given the restriction that the objects do not cluster on all the attributes, not even on a single subset of attributes, but often on different subsets of attributes in the data.

Leiden physicists are helping Wageningen plant researchers to study unpredictable plant embryos. For this, they are using a novel two-photon fluorescence microscope, aided by a 30 thousand euro ZonMW grant.

Two bacterial species team up inside the plant root system to rescue their host from fungal infection. This was discovered by a team of microbiologists and bioinformaticians from the Netherlands Institute of Ecology, Wageningen University, and the Institute of Biology Leiden. They also identified the…

There is much wrong with the taxonomy of the plant genus Phyllanthus. Roderick Bouman of the Hortus botanicus Leiden has developed a new phylogeny for Phyllanthus and exposes the evolution of the plant genus. Publication in TAXON.

PhD at Molecular Biology and Biochemistry Department, University of Malaga - Spain

Neanderthals in cold regions probably ate a lot more vegetable food than was previously thought. This is what archaeologist Robert Power has discovered based on new research on ancient Neanderthal dental plaque. PhD defence 1 November.