Emma is a computational systems biologist who enjoys working in multi-disciplinary research teams. During her Ph.D. research, she studied noisy gene expression networks to investigate the implications of cell-to-cell variability on cellular fitness through a combination of experimental (single-cell) analysis and mathematical modelling. Her work in the Huck group is focused on designing mathematical models […]
The Huck group was well represented this year at CHAINS – the main chemistry conference for chemists in the Netherlands. One of our postdocs, Oliver Maguire, presented his recent work on a prebiotic phosphorylation system for creating phosphorylated molecules critical to the Origins of Life. Many members of the group also presented their work in […]
In collaboration with researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute, University of Minnesota, and Santa Fe Institute, we published a paper describing 2 years of attempts to derive a cell-free expression (CFE) system based on Mycoplasma bacterium. What seemed to be a simple and straightforward project, turned out to be challenging due to unique features […]
Forward engineering of (cell-free) genetic networks is one of the main goals in the field of synthetic biology. However, despite the vast library of available building blocks for the assembly of these networks, identifying the reaction kinetics to make these building blocks modular for forward engineering remains elusive. In our latest work we established an […]
CLASSY consortium finally had a chance to meet again in person on June 16-17 in Madrid. This time the meeting was hosted by the group of Andrés de la Escosura from Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Miglė Jakštaitė and Wilhelm Huck were presenting and discussing the progress in enzymatic cascade reactions and process optimisation together with […]
Over the past months, many PhDs, postdocs, and PIs from Building a Synthetic Cell (BaSyC) consortium have contributed to a podcast series about our efforts to build a synthetic cell. The Rathenau Instituut, in collaboration with designer Mies Loogman, created this 4-episode podcast series that is called ‘Herschept’ (In Dutch), and the final episode is […]
Four billion years ago, Life emerged from the prebiotic environment. We know many building blocks required for Life may have been present at this point. However, Life is more than the sum of its components. These collections of chemical building blocks had to work together to create Life using only information from their environment and […]
The Late Night Conference with Wilhelm Huck is back again for the final episode on Thursday 2nd June, 20h00 CET! This sixth and final episode of season 2 of the Late Night Conference with Wilhelm Huck will be streamed live on our YouTube channel Late Night Conference with WH (don’t forget to subscribe & watch […]
We are very excited to share our new paper on Analytical Chemistry entitled “A Bayesian Approach to Extracting Kinetic Information from Artificial Enzymatic Networks”. In this paper authors demonstrate how a Bayesian approach takes into account experimental and modelling uncertainties of enzymatic reaction networks to improve estimations of kinetic parameters. Congratulations to Mathieu Baltussen, Jeroen […]
Last week (May 16-17) two day off-site PhD Days event was hosted by PPIMM (PhD Panel IMM). During the event PhD students within the IMM gave entry-level presentations of their research. Our group was represented by Thijs de Jong and Miglė Jakštaitė. Besides this, PhD students were discussing variety of different topics like collaboration with […]