Ludwig Schulte, Mikolaj Czaplejewicz, Dhruv sharma and Jonathon Bird successfully defended master thesis project on "GWAS IE - Information extraction for genome wide association studies". The group developed an LLM-based automated information extraction system to identify key biological entities and their relationships from scientific literature and translate this information in the form of a knowledge graph. The resulting tool aids researchers in rapidly uncovering and organizing genotype–phenotype insights from GWAS papers, demonstrating both high accuracy and strong coverage in a specialized scientific domain. This work was jointly supervised by Prof. Wim Vriezen (Head, Plant Functional Genomics BFFI Maastricht University), Dr. Aki Harma (Assistant Professor DACS, Maastricht University) and myself. Congratulations to the team on their successful defense. Good luck for future scientific adventures.
Selen Pehlivanoglu, Mara Wackermann, Anne Savelkoul, Tereza Stockova and Jerry Overweg presented their project on "Transcriptomics-based profiling of tomato responses against fungal and bacterial infections". The study examined how biosynthetic and signalling pathways are activated in Solanum lycopersicum (tomato plant) during bacterial and fungal infections. RNA sequencing data was analysed to identify differentially expressed genes under stress conditions, focusing on mapping them to key biosynthetic and signalling pathways identified from the literature. Congratulations to the team their successful presentation and final report. Good luck for future scientific adventures.
Felicia C. Wolters defended her master dissertation (Master of Science, Major Phytopathology and Entomology) on the topic "Evolution of the Hydroxygeranyllinalool Diterpene Glycoside Pathway in Solanaceae". This work was jointly supervised by Iris Kappers (Plant physiology, WUR), Marnix Medema (Bioinformatic group, WUR) and me. Congratulations to Felicia on her successful defense and good luck for future scientific adventures.
This project (Nov 2014 - Mar 2021) was mainly driven by key questions in resistance evolution of insect-pests to natural and synthetic insecticides. I used genome-wide investigations and computational approaches to answer such questions, ensuring these are relevant to a broad scientific community.