University of Groningen
Bacillus subtilis: sporulation, competence and the ability to take up fluorescently labelled DNA
Boonstra, Mirjam
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Publication date: 2017
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Boonstra, M. (2017). Bacillus subtilis: sporulation, competence and the ability to take up fluorescently labelled DNA. Rijksuniversiteit Groningen.
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197 Acknowledgements
My time at Molgen was a period in which I've grown not only as a scientist but also as a person. I have not had a single day that I did not enjoy coming to work. When doing your promotion research it helps enormously to have a good working environment. And the people in Molgen provided an intellectually stimulating, optimistic and fun environment. There are many people I would like to thank who helped make my promotion period such a great time.
First I would like to thank my promotor Oscar Kuipers. Doing a PhD comes with challenges, and the guidance and support of a good promotor is crucial to success. I am grateful for the excellent supervision, advice and for allowing me to visit so many interesting conferences. You were always optimistic and I enjoyed our brainstorming sessions and progress talks. I am also truly grateful for the amount of independence you gave me in choosing the direction of the research projects. I also very much appreciated the opportunity to develop skills beyond the scientific. Thank you for creating a group where diversity is valued and where people are allowed to be themselves.
My thanks also goes out to my collaborators from Greifswald. Uwe Völker and Ulrike Mäder, thank you for making me feel welcome in your group and your advice on the paper. Special thanks go out to Marc Schaffer who was crucial to the experimental part of our research. My thanks also go out to Petra Hildebrandt and Praveen Kumar Sappa for their help with the FACS and proteomics. I am also grateful to Joana Sousa and Michael Lalk my collaborators on the metabolomics part of the research.
I would like to thank Jan-Willem Veening for the help and advice he gave me during the first part of my PhD, the work on Spo0A and replication. You also thought me some tricks in dealing with B. subtilis that came in handy multiple times during my PhD.
Jeroen Siebring my lab and office mate. Thank you so much for all the help and advice that you gave me, in particular with regards to microscopy. I never thought I would miss our conversations on bodily functions, but oddly I did. It was nice having a conversational sparring partner for whom no topic was off limits.
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Luiza and Barbara. Thank you for the great time I've had both in the office and the lab. I always enjoyed coming to work in part thanks the two of you. It was nice to be share the office with two people with whom I had both very intellectual and very mundane conversations. You both helped me see things from a different perspective, and I had a lot of fun with you as my office mates. Luiza, thanks also for doing preperative work in the lab for my experiments.
Anne de Jong. I am grateful for all the advice and help that you gave me with the RNA-sequencing data.
Thanks also to Imke de Jong whose work on Spo0A and replication I continued. She was also my truly excellent supervisor during my master project.
I am also grateful for having had Nina Vesel as a master student. She did much of the initial work on microfluidics. Having a good master student can make a difference, and Nina was very good indeed.
I would also like to thank Siger for the timely ordering of labelled nucleotides and the help with non-functioning machines.
During my PhD many other people were part of the Bacillus & Molgen lab and each in their own way made it a pleasure to work there. Marielle thank you for the advice on experiments. You also had a challenging project and it was nice to have someone who understands both the perks and downsides of working mostly independently. Ard-Jan I enjoyed our discussions on politics and talks about cats & dogs. Manolo thank you for helping me practice speaking Spanish and for the chats in the array lab which made doing FACs a lot less boring. Elrike my cleanliness ally, I always enjoyed our professional and casual conversations, best of luck in realising your ambitions. Yi and Haojie thank for giving me some insight into China. Anne-Stephanie who has excellent insight into human behaviour, thanks for all the chats. Agniezka Gruszka with whom I had a brief collaboration on measuring the size of the ComEC pore, unfortunately the method we used did not yield results. My gratitude also goes out to: Ruud, Sornchai, Julio, Wout, Maarten, Tonia, Sjoerd, Jelle, Lieke, Katrin, Maike, Morten, Anna, Andrius, Xin, Robin, Martijn, Tom, Auke, Robyn, Ákos, Amanda and all the other people I met during my time at Molgen. Having a good work environment won't help you succeed if your private life is not. I would therefore like to thank my parents for their love and support, and for always believing in me and supporting my descisions.
