Droevendaalsesteeg 10
6708 PB Wageningen
The Netherlands
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About
I am a bioinformatician with a microbiology background, linking microbial genetic variation to ecological function and biotechnological potential. My long-term goal is to make microbial collections FAIR and predictive, for sustainable plant protection.
Biography
Scientific outlook.
Microbial strain collections are often large but only loosely connected to what the strains actually do. I work on closing that gap: starting from genomes, I use comparative genomics and genome mining to identify biosynthetic and functional traits, and test them in synthetic communities (SynComs) with amplicon and metaproteomic readouts. The next step is to select strains for a given plant-protection task from their genomes and ecological context, rather than by screening alone.
Research highlights.
I did my PhD in the Kovács lab at the Technical University of Denmark, working on Bacillales genomics, and continued as a postdoc at the Institute of Biology Leiden. There I led genome mining of 121 Bacillaceae strains and a lignin-degrading SynCom project across three research groups. Along the way I built open workflows: BAST, tuf amplicon sequencing to resolve closely related Bacillus species; AmPair, a Snakemake pipeline for designing species-discriminating primers; and FalconSyn, a Falcon-tube hydroponic platform for plant–SynCom experiments. At NIOO, I work on the Gates Foundation project on a collection of about 19,000 genome-sequenced, plant-associated bacterial strains.