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In the beginning of this summer Charlotte and Bram went to Lisbon to visit the lab of Rita Fior at the Champalimaud Foundation (Centre for the unknown). Charlotte focused on the final details of the zebrafish xenograft protocols and Bram learned all about the tips and tricks to inject human tumor cells in zebrafish embryos. At the end of the week, Charlotte presented her work to the team and future collaborations were discussed. The results of Charlotte's project will be presented at ZDM14 in October! Many thanks to Rita and her team for the intersting week and all their help. We will miss the lab view at the tagus, the wonderful Portugese sun and delicious pasteis de Belém! Hope to see you soon.
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 There is a new vacancy in our team, we're looking for a research assistant! At least 50% of your assignment will be spent on academic research in preparation of a doctoral dissertation, with as subject 'Prediction of surgical resectability after FOLFIRINOX chemotherapy for borderline resectable and locally advanced pancreatic cancer'. If you're graduated as a Master in Bioengineer, Biotechnology, Biomedical Sciences or similar, want to aim for a doctoral dissertation and want to join our fun team this can be your chance! Find all the information right here and maybe we'll see you in the near future. We have some new members in our research team!
Just like last year Oxford Nanopore Technology held their annual London Calling online. Kim, Mattias, Greet and Bram attended the meeting.  On April 28th CRIG organized their third online OncoDot meeting. It was again a great edition.
Charlotte was selected for a storm session. She pitched her abstract ‘HEADING TOWARDS AN IN VIVO PREDICTIVE TEST FOR PERSONALIZED OVARIAN CANCER TREATMENT: APPLICATION OF NOVEL THERAPIES IN ZEBRAFISH PATIENT DERIVED XENOGRAFTS’. Also Greet had the chance to present her work, titled ‘PREVALENCE OF GERMLINE PATHOGENIC VARIANTS IN CANCER PREDISPOSING GENES IN CZECH AND BELGIAN PANCREATIC CANCER PATIENTS’. Both did a tremendous job, congratulations! Shout out to CRIG for organizing these three great symposiums! The Faculties of Medicine and Health Sciences, Pharmaceutical Sciences and Veterinary Medicine organized an online edition of Research Day on March 25th 2021.
They invited to impressive keynote speakers who talked about the COVID-19 pandemic: Prof. Steven Van Gucht (Head of Service Viral Disease, Sciensano and Visiting Professor Laboratory of Virology, Ghent University) and Prof. Bart Lambrecht (Science Director VIB-UGent Center for Inflammation Research and Pulmonologist Ghent University Hospital). Also on the program was Lynn who was selected for a 10 minute presentation. She talked about her work on 'MISSING HERITABILITY IN BLOOM SYNDROME: FIRST REPORT OF A DEEP INTRONIC VARIANT LEADING TO PSEUDO-EXON ACTIVATION IN THE BLM GENE'. On 23 and 24 februari the B-CAST BRIDGES Online Closing Symposium was held, the symposium titled 'Breast Cancer Risk and Prognostication: Germline and Tumor Genetics'. For our lab Kathleen and Bram attended.
Today CRIG organized their second online OncoDot meeting and for the second time our entire team was present.
Lynn did a fantastic talk and was awarded for her abstract presentation ‘Integration of genomics and transcriptomics to identify DNA damage defects in PID patients with a cancer predisposition’. We want to thank the organization, looking forward to OncoDot3! Jeroen's his paper 'Zebrafish as an in vivo screening tool to establish PARP inhibitor efficacy ' is accepted and published in DNA Repair, you can find it here.
 17/12/2020
Finally the day has come, Jeroen held his Public PhD defense of his doctoral dissertation entitled ‘Zebrafish as a model to study DNA repair and developmental defects following loss of BRCA2 or ATM'. Jeroen did a perfect job! So from now on it's Dr. Vierstraete, congrats! NXTGNT purchased a PromethION from Oxford Nanopore. This new sequencer will be available to our research group in the future.
To get familiar with the appliance Bram joined the online mini-symposium hosted by the company on 10/12/2020. Early December Oxford Nanopore hosted their annual Community Meeting, online this year of course. From our lab Bram, Kim and Mattias attended.   MRC Holland launched a new kit that combines MLPA with NGS. Bram joined the webinar of the firm and already tested the new kit in our lab. On 27 november the virtual kick-off symposium of the Rare-Med Consorium took place. Our whole research group joined and enjoyed the great talks, among which the great talk of our own teammember Lynn Backers about missing heritability in a rare disease, Bloom Syndrome.  Lynn her first paper 'Missing heritability in Bloom syndrome: First report of a deep intronic variant leading to pseudo-exon activation in the BLM gene' was accepted and published in Clinical Genetics. Find it here.
After a whole period of scientific silence, our entire team was able to attend the first online OncoDot meeting organized by CRIG.
Charlotte was awarded for her storm session presentation ‘ISOLATION AND ENGRAFTMENT OF CIRCULATING TUMOR CELLS INTO ZEBRAFISH EMBRYOS TO PREDICT TUMOR RESPONSE OF OVARIAN CANCER PATIENTS’ at OncoDot1, congrats! We want to thank the organization, looking forward to OncoDot2! Prof. Claes had a talk on the ENIGMA meeting about long read sequencing.
Jeroen, Mattias, Greet and Bram attended. Due to the coronavirus pandemic Oxford Nanopore Technology held their annual London Calling this year online. Kim, Mattias, Greet and Bram attended the whole meeting. There was a training session about 'how to load a flongle', therefore the company shipped a demo kit so Bram could learn about the flongle.  From 6-9 june the annual European Society of Human Genetics were held online, Kim attended for our lab and had a poster presentation.
 Lynn got a certificate for the interuniversity postgraduate course in Human Genetics organised by the Belgian Society of Human Genetics (BeSHG). Congratulations!
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