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Scientists from TU Delft have found how confined microalgal cells grow optimally in photosynthetic engineered living materials. With the use of light energy, the microalgae convert CO2 from the air into sugars, energy and oxygen for their survival. Such algae-based living materials could be used in a range of applications, from functional objects for CO2 capture, to oxygen sources for biological tissues. The team, led by Marie-Eve Aubin-Tam and Kunal Masania, present their new insights in Advanced Materials.

The Dutch Research Council (NWO) has awarded grants to 28 promising research projects in the field of Exact and Natural Sciences (ENW), including two at the Faculty of Applied Sciences at Delft University of Technology. The grants of up to 50,000 euros are part of the Open Competition ENW-XS. Eva Bertosin receives the grant for her work on nanopores and Kui Yu is awarded for his research on living building materials.

Delft University of Technology and its Kavli Institute of Nanoscience received a five-million-dollar grant from The Kavli Foundation to fund a collaborative effort to develop the quantum equivalent of telecommunication.

To engineer successful microbial communities, scientists need to predict whether microorganisms can live and work together. One popular predictive rule states that if a pair of microbes will coexist, they will also coexist in a bigger community of microbes. A study published in Science now found that this simple rule will not always work.

Through our annual Educator of the Year election, we highlight excellence in education. On 27 June during the AS Education Afternoon, Paulien Herder, dean of AS, announced the Educators of the Year by AS programme and the overall winner: Dr. Greg Bokinsky.

On Saturday 3 June 2023, 276 participants took part in the attempt to set the Guinness World Records pipetting, organised by Nanobiology students from Delft University of Technology and Erasmus MC. Within only 5 minutes the volunteers managed to simultaneously suck up and displace fluids with a pipette.

The Domain Board Science of the Dutch Research Council (NWO) has awarded 28 applications in the Open Competition Domain Science - XS. One of the honoured applications is from Aswin Muralidharan for project ‘Using bacterial defense machinery for selective killing of cancer cells’. Aswin Muralidharan is a postdoctoral researcher with Prof. Stan Brouns (Department of Bionanoscience). Muralidharan’s current research interest lies in interactions of bacteria and bacteriophages.

Marileen Dogterom, Professor of Bionanosciences at the Faculty of Applied Sciences (AS) and president of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), was made a Knight of the Order of the Dutch Lion in the municipality of Woerden. The so-called ribbon is a reward for someone who has done groundbreaking (scientific) work for Dutch society.

DNA replication is the process whereby cells make an exact copy of their DNA before cell division. A key part of the intricate DNA replication machinery is a molecular motor called CMG, which has the vital task of separating the two strands of the DNA double helix so that they can be copied. An interdisciplinary team of researchers from TU Delft has now developed a new methodology to assemble and image the motion of CMG with unprecedented resolution.

The Executive Board has appointed Stan Brouns as full professor of Molecular Microbiology at the department of Bionanoscience as of 7 February 2023. His work focuses on how microbes defend themselves from viruses. Brouns: “Bacteria have had a few billion years of evolution to come up with all sorts of clever ways to defend themselves from viruses. We aim to uncover what they have evolved over all this time.”