University of Groningen
Membrane fusion of influenza and chikungunya viruses
Blijleven, Jelle
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Publication date:
2018
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Citation for published version (APA):
Blijleven, J. (2018). Membrane fusion of influenza and chikungunya viruses: Mechanisms inferred from
single-particle experiments. Rijksuniversiteit Groningen.
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Acknowledgements
For my Master’s project I wanted to do something experimental and with connection to everyday life. JasperC brought to my attention that a biophysics group had landed in Groningen lead by Prof. Antoine
van Oijen. I emailed him because I was excited about his DNA replication projects. Having been turned down for lack of time for supervision, I retried and went by his office. And then the ball started rolling. The one thing I will remember strongest about my PhD years is you all: there are so many people with whom I was lucky to work together, to travel, to have lunch breaks, to simply hang out. Collaborating, sharing data and thoughts about that data, with everyone providing their own viewpoint and points of focus — this is what kept me going in the laborious, trouble-shooting and often frustrating experience that is research. I want to express a big thank you here to everyone involved and some people especially. My first promotor and supervisor, Antoine. You are able to bring together a group of wonderful peo-ple. I’ve greatly enjoyed the atmosphere in the group the first part of my PhD and you were an important factor in that. I found your style of leadership inspiring, very much enthusing, bold and at the same time with careful attention for the personal side of things. You left for Australia with my PhD not even halfway and for me this was a defining moment. Even from the other side of the globe your input always was very quick and was key in helping me find my way more independently. All the best for you, your family and lab down under.
My initial daily supervisor, Jason. You showed me the ropes and helped me to learn troubleshooting, equipment maintenance and data analysis. I’ve worked a long time with your Matlab code for analysis! You taught me how to do things good which is important to get those pesky single-particle experiments to work. Your working hard and being a little crazy in a good way was very inspiring to me.
I was happy that the two people closest to me in research accepted to be my paranymphs. Mareike, our collaboration on Chikungunya virus was wonderful and resulted in a publication and hopefully another more. I fondly recall our meetings, your input from a virologist’s perspective and tried to emulate your structured way of building up an article. Sander, we might pull it off to publish an article together! We bridged the gap in scale that we identified very early on in our parallel and connected PhDs. Our literature meetings resulted in two reviews and writing those was very enjoyable. You are a structured and well-organized researcher, to my improvement as well, and I greatly enjoyed our meetings and conference trips.
Erik, my second promotor, and Patrick, together with Sander we had a very fruitful collaboration. Thinking of new ideas to bridge the theoretical-experimental gap, working on the literature reviews and keeping each other updated on our progress was fun. Thank you for all the discussions and critical thinking about established models (or should I state what kind of model, Erik?). Tijana, our discussions were ex-tremely valuable for me over the course of our flu project. Awesome that you produced those mutants. Special thanks to Meisui Liu. Wouter, you came to Groningen at the right moment, providing me with a new home. You also built up a group of great people. Thank you for making me feel part of your group immediately. GuusvdB, best of luck in viral fusion! I hope you will further transfer our knowledge. Jolanda,
your input in our Chikungunya collaboration was absolutely invaluable. You learned me a lot on writing a scientific paper and to bring the message across. Special thanks also to Ellen (with your help I think we put a great article together!), Mariana and Denise.
I am very grateful to the assessment committee for reading and assessing this thesis: prof. Susan Dan-iel, prof. Anke Huckriede and prof. Antoinette Killian.
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Thanks for all the good (and bad) days; the people of the SMB group I started in: Jan Peter, Karl, Victor, Alex, Hylkje, Viktor, Samaneh, Joris, Andrew, Stephanie, GuusE, Michiel, Sarah, Audrey, Iuliia, Ilya,
Machteld, Vicky, Lisanne and Enrico (congrats to you two!!). Also the MM group: Thorben, JaspervdV
(thanks for all the (job) discussions and breaks!), Jochem, Marijn, Monique, Evelyn, Ati, Florence, Kostas, Yichen, Giorgos, Nikos, Yusran. And finally, my new home, the MBP group: Sourav, Yuzhen, Ignacio, Yukun, Melissa, Pedro, Valerie, Scarlett, Cat, Lee, Thabi. It was a pleasure to supervise your Bachelor’s project, Chaline. Margriet and Jeanette, thanks for all your help in (formal) matters.
Collaborations made my PhD all the more worthwhile and I would like to thank all my collaborators and contributors for the discussions and projects: prof. Andreas Hermann, Zhuojun, Qing (all the best for Ruby, too!), Agnieszka; Marc Stuart; Marleen Otzen; prof. David Baker, Aaron Chevalier; prof. Kelly Lee, Vidya Mangala Prasad; Irene Kim; David Torrico; José Herrera Rodriguez.
En natuurlijk wil ik nog vrienden en familie bedanken, misschien voor niets in het bijzonder, maar daarom juist zo veel. 很感谢 Hui, Anna, Carmen, André, 祝你们中文课顺利！; iedereen van het GSp, Tiemo, Matty, voor verdieping én plezier; Henry, Maurits, Roel, JasperC, Klaas, Dafne, Johanan, Jakoba, Cees,
Kim, Monique, Keri, Gerco, voor de vele spelletjes, gesprekken en gewoon gezelligheid, wat zo belangrijk voor me was om ook even uit dat onderzoek te komen; de filosofiegroep, Hans, Christine, dat we nog lang mogen doorgaan!; Vincent, onze vriendschap is ontzettend lang en doet me veel goed; Harm Jan, dat we nog lange tijd samen mogen zoeken en vinden; Bernard, Jenny, Floor, Nora, IJsbrand, Cobie, Frits, Katinka, ik zou jullie familie willen noemen omdat we elkaar misschien niet heel vaak zien, maar ik me toch altijd direct thuis met jullie voel en dat is geweldig. En Alie, Hielkje, Jolt, Paula, Auke en Empar, echt fijn om jullie als echte familie te hebben.
Anne en Kees, het doet me veel goed dat jullie er voor ons zijn. Bedankt voor je grote aandacht en ontspanning Anne, en prachtig om je met Lieuwe te zien. De zekere lichtheid waarmee je het leven lijkt te nemen straalt zeker af, Kees. Karlien, zusje, met jou kan ik over alles spreken voor mijn gevoel. Veel plezier ook in het onderzoek of daarbuiten! Harry en Korrie, bedankt voor jullie grote betrokkenheid en dat jullie altijd klaarstaan om te helpen, in momenten van kleinere en van grotere nood. Die steun heeft mij ontzettend veel geholpen. Jullie opvoeding is voor mij ook een grote inspiratie met Lieuwe.
En als allerlaatste noem ik Laia en Lieuwe, die zoveel voor mij betekenen. Laia, te kiezen of we naar Australië zouden gaan was niet makkelijk, en er waren dagen dat ik geheel werd opgeslokt door experi-menten of schrijven. Dat hebben we allemaal samen meegemaakt en, in zekere zin, overwonnen. Ik ben blij als ik bij je thuis kom, omdat je me energie geeft, op verassende momenten opvrolijkt en er voor me bent.
Jelle 14 augustus 2018
