May 2017 – Departmental researchers Dr. Iris Jonkers and Dr. Sasha Zhernakova have both been awarded 2017 Vidi grants! These awards from the Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO – The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research) provide €800,000 for excellent original research programs that can be used to fund up to five years of research. Dr. Jonkers will be using newly developed techniques to identify which single nucleotide polymorphisms truly play a causal role in immune mediated disease using celiac disease as a model. Dr. Zhernakova will characterize the breast milk microbiome and the role it plays in baby health in the LifeLines Next cohort of

We are very pleased to announce that Dr. Jingyuan Fu has been appointed an associate professor per February 2015. We offer her our warm congratulations. On behalf of the Management Team Prof. Cisca Wijmenga, Head of department More about Jingyuan Fu and about her work

Read an interview with Cisca Wijmenga about some of her work. She “is fascinated by the study of coeliac disease; here, she discusses her close connection to the history of the field, the changes brought about by new sequencing methods and the importance of collaboration”. Read about:   Navigating the non-coding regions of the genome  –  Genome of the Netherlands   —  Non-coding RNA  –  Coeliac disease the facts  –  Genetic risk profiling The project “Coeliac disease: from lincRNAs to disease mechanism (CD-Link)”  is supported by an ERC Advanced Investigator grant. By Josh Gabbatiss. Published courtesy of International Innovation – a leading scientific dissemination service. Link to full

The family tree of the Dutch people has been deciphered by researchers at 5 Dutch universities under the leadership of Prof. Cisca Wijmenga of the UMCG in Groningen. The early history of the Dutch can be re-written and diseases can be better predicted. The research is described in a Nature Genetics article published yesterday. `Paul de Bakker, Cisca Wijmenga and colleagues report on The Genome of the Netherlands Project, including whole-genome sequencing of 769 individuals of Dutch ancestry from 250 parent-offspring families and construction of a phased haplotype map. Their intermediate-coverage population sequencing data set provides a complementary resource to

May 2014: NWO (Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research) has awarded VIDI grants to Jingyuan Fu for her project on “Understanding the causal relationships between the host genome, microbiota and lipids” and to Lude Franke for his project on “A novel approach to understanding how DNA variants cause disease”. (1) Understanding the causal relationships between the host genome, microbiota and lipids - Dr. Jingyuan Fu Lipid composition varies widely between human individuals and is associated with many diseases. Numerous studies have shown that the lipid composition can be affected by an individual’s genetic make-up and intestinal microbial composition. Over millions of years, microbes and humans have formed a truly symbiotic relationship.

On 11 January 2014, there was an article in the Dutch national newspaper ‘NRC’ about Lude Franke’s bioinformatics work at UMCG (request pdf, in Dutch). And on 14 January, the UMCG magazine ‘Kennis in Zicht’ had a piece about Jingyuan Fu’s work (here, in Dutch).

PhD thesis by Naishi Li in Dr Jingyuan Fu’s group. University of Groningen, Dec. 2013, abstract and full text available here