New PhD student Eva Drukker

Eva Drukker (MSc) is from the Netherlands and studied biology at Wageningen University. She did her internship research at the Bureau Stadsnatuur, studying arthropods on green roofs. In March, just before the Corona outbreak, she started her PhD on this topic supervised by Prof. Eric Schranz, Casper Quist and me. For the coming four years she will be studying these new ecosystems in our urban landscape. Among other things she is trying to unravel the complicated interactions that take place in these elevated habitats. Besides her research, she is very fond of and experienced in teaching and therefore takes part in two courses that we give at Biosystematics Group.

Credits: Judith Tielemans


New publications 2020


7th Vidi user committee meeting – on Skype

On April 20th we had our 7th meeting but our first online – due to the covid-19 outbreak. It went relatively smoothly and almost all members were present. We made quite some progress the last couple of months especially in Niccolo’s project on the genetics. Now that Lotte is back from maternity leave her project on the elicitor is getting back on track again!

Luis Paniagua Voirol’s PhD defence


New publication by Eddie Griese in Oecologia


6th Vidi user committee meeting


New paper in preprint on BioRxiv

Eddie Griese's second paper on 'Plant responses to butterfly oviposition partly explain preference-performance relationships on different brassicaceous species' is under review but the preprint is available on BioRxiv https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/706044v1

So far it was well perceived and #1 paper in Ecology in BioRxiv when published https://twitter.com/assert_pub/status/1156132809125351424


Manuscript on bioRxiv

10 years after collecting new Trichogramma wasps from passion-vine butterflies in a tropical rain-forest in Panama we manage to identify and describe them! Without no doubt, this is a classical Biosystematics publication!


New publication in Ecological Entomology


5th Vidi User committee meeting

On Monday 19th of November, our 5th user committee meeting took place. This meeting marked our halfway point, we are now two years underway with the NWO/TTW VIDI-funded project on pest-killing plants.

Compared to previous meetings, the Vidi team had decreased a bit in size, Setareh Mohammadin has gone on maternity leave, Gabriella Bukovinskine Kiss went to work full time at the Laboratory of Genetics, and visiting PhD student Xiuji Wang returned to China. Luckily, several students are joining our team in the coming weeks and a new research and education assistant is being recruited at the moment.
Representatives of all companies in the user committee were present and gave good feedback on our results. We were also happy to see the addition of Klaas Bouwmeester to our committee. Klaas has a strong background in phytopathology and is now a researcher in the Biosystematics group.

Niccolò and Lotte presented their work of the last 7 months. Niccolo showed his work on screening a population of Brassica rapa for egg-triggered necrosis. With the help of many lab members a Brassica rapa population was screened for Large Cabbage White egg-triggered necrosis. Niccolo has also improved methods to perform automated imaging, segmentation and quantification of lesion size. His work will continue using this method to map the response in B. rapa. Lotte presented work on the identification of the elicitor of the egg-triggered response. She was able to zoom in on the compound that triggers the response in plants. In the coming months, both parts of the project promise to give exciting results. @LotteCaarls