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In the Life Science & Technology (LST) degree programme you study the functioning and applications of the living cell: the building block of all plants, humans, animals and micro-organisms. This can be your contribution to a clean and healthy world.

Climate change is a challenge for both current and future generations. New biological resources have to be developed in order to meet the demand for energy as well as the demand for food.

A management strategy has been developed for field margins to reduce pesticide drift to non-target areas and to promote biodiversity on arable land. To this end, 3 and 6 m wide strips along the edges of winter wheat, sugar beet and potato crops have been left unsprayed with herbicides and insecticides…

In populations with a seed-bank, individuals can temporarily become dormant and refrain from reproduction until they can become active again. The repository of all dormant individuals in the population is called the seed-bank. Seed-banks are observed in many taxa, including plants, bacteria and other…

In recent decades, climate change has led to more frequent and severe drought events, causing serious consequences such as increased forest mortality and significant crop yield losses. Understanding how drought affects plants, especially economically important herbaceous species, is crucial for predicting…

Natural vanilla flavor is one of the most important in the world. However, the cost of this flavor is expensive. Production of this flavor by alternative methods, could reduce the cost.

OB associations are loose groups of young, massive stars. They constitute the last stage of the massive starformation process, and the context in which new stars are formed.

Large-scale forest fires started by prehistoric hunter-gatherers are probably the reason why Europe is not more densely forested. This is the finding of an international team, including climate researcher Professor Jed Kaplan of the University of Lausanne and archaeologist Professor Jan Kolen of Leiden…

How do processes of coalition-formation influence patterns of decision-making in the European Union?

In astronomy, the interpration of observations and measurements plays a crucial role: we rely purely and fundamentally on the information that reaches us as observers. And 80% of all matter in the universe is undetectable directly.

One of the effects of climate change is the phenomenon of desertification, a process that occurs in semi-arid and arid areas and causes land degradation as well as vegetation loss. Due to the lack of resources, vegetation self-organizes to sustain itself by forming large-scale spatial patterns.

Even though more than 4000 extra-solar planets are known today, only a small fraction of these has been captured in an image. To better understand the planet formation mechanisms in solar-like environments we started the Young Suns Exoplanet Survey (YSES).

Researchers from five different discplines work together in this interdisciplinary initiative.

The center studies the many ways in which issues of law and justice are dealt with in art and literature with a focus on liminal issues and cases. These are issues and cases where law comes to the limits of what it is capable of dealing with and art and literature explore the implications of what is…

The oldest university in the Netherlands has produced many well-known scientists. Some of them are known to the wider public; others are perhaps less well known, but their achievements are no less impressive.

Pathogenic bacteria are increasingly resistant to today’s antibiotics. Professor Gilles van Wezel seeks new forms of antibiotics in good bacteria that live in the soil.

Why do flowers often smell so wonderful? And some other plants are very horrible? Come smell it, see it and discover it in the visitor center in the Old Observatory. Suitable for young and old.

How will we celebrate our anniversary in 2025?

For the first time, international researchers have mapped the network of bacteria on coral reefs. They write about it in Nature Communications (9 April). Professor by special appointment Nicole de Voogd (Naturalis Biodiversity Center & Institute of Environmental Sciences) and two of her PhD students…

Evolution is all around you every day. This is the message of a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) of Leiden University and Naturalis that is offered free of charge to anyone interested.

Publication of Johann Natterer's (1787-1843) word lists of Amazonian languages.

Ecotox is a stimulating top-facility that provides an integrative research environment around the topic of ecotoxicological testing and experimental research. Research focus: Dose-response modelling Mode-of-actions and mechanism-of-actions Test method development, in view of targets in AOPs (adverse…

The Advisory Board of the IBL consists of five eminent scientists with specialist expertise in complementary disciplines. They all have prominent positions for the field of Biology in the Netherlands outside our own institute.

Promotores: Prof.dr. F.P. Israel, Prof.dr. P.P. van der Werf

The thesis explores how interstellar chemistry evolves as a function of time and changing physical architectures during the formation of stars.

In this thesis, we aimed to better understand the underlying mechanisms involved in TNBC progression and metastasis formation and discover new targets to reduce breast cancer related deaths.

Promotor: Prof.dr. J. Kuiper, Co-promotor: Saskia C.A. de Jager

Bacteria have the ability to alter their morphology in order to adapt to changing environments.

The Editors of PAIR are always interested in suggestions for themed editions. Anyone wishing to propose a theme and/or to assist as a ‘guest editor’ should contact one of the editors of PAIR.

This week has seen the publication of the Research Handbook on Cross-border Bank Resolution.

What categories exist in the languages of pastoralists? Do these semantic concepts reflect universal or languagespecific tendencies? What (environment? culture?) governs the similarities (or the differences) attested crosslinguistically in cattle colour systems?

On 23 September, the Leiden alderman for the Management of Public Space was presented with a Ginkgo Biloba in the Blekerspark. This special 'Peace Tree' was grown from a seed from a tree that survived the atomic bomb that devastated Hiroshima. The Peace Tree is being temporarily housed in Leiden's Hortus…

Join-in courses zijn MA-cursussen over middeleeuwse onderwerpen gegeven binnen vastgestelde MA-programma's van de zes deelnemende universiteiten van de Onderzoekschool. Op aanvraag zijn deze vakken toegankelijk voor studenten van andere (Nederlandse) universiteiten. De cursusbelasting en het aantal…

The physical landscape is the setting in which human activities take place. Landscape and site context during human occupation is one of the areas of concern for the geoarchaeologist. A detailed stratigraphical study -both on- and off-site- clearly enhances the interpretation of the archaeologists,…

At CWTS we have a long tradition of organising a weekly research seminar in which speakers present their research in the area of science studies and discuss their work with the audience. The seminar normally takes place on Friday, 15.00-16.15h (Central European Time). Presentations are given in Engl…

A delegation from Leiden University will be visiting several Japanese universities and research institutions from 18 to 26 November to discuss research and teaching collaborations.

Leiden University's Citizen Science Lab supports and organizes initiatives where anyone can get started with scientific data and research. This is how we enrich research with insights from the community, make science accessible to all, and tackle important local issues together.

The research aims to understand how did Cuban and Dominican landscape encapsulate historical conceptual transformations about human –nature spiritual interaction after the Spanish conquest? More specifically, what are the present day cultural associations with Cuban and Dominican natural landscape?…

Through his project we will unravel the global regulatory networks that control gene expression in Streptomyces bacteria and allow them to properly respond to major changes in the environment; we will then harness this knowledge to activate and identify novel antibiotics

We live in a world of things and people in the past must have been as closely entangled with their material surroundings as we are now. In the Laboratory for Artefact Studies Van Gijn takes a close look at the biographies of objects: what kind of raw material an object is made off and what is its provenience,…

Increasing above- and belowground biodiversity in arable leek cultivation to stimulate pest control by natural enemies.

The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics has been badly affected by the corona crisis: the research in the four labs and the fieldwork has come to a standstill. What are the implications?

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