BioSB Young Investigator Award 2019

Eva Brinkman

The selection committee of the BioSB Young Investigator Award 2019 has selected this year's award winner!

The winner is: Eva Brinkman (SciLifeLab, Stockholm).

Eva will receive the award during the award ceremony on April 3rd, 15:30 and she will give
an honorary lecture afterward.

Biography

Eva Karina Brinkman studied Life Science & Technology at the Delft University of Technology and University Leiden. During this studies Eva did an internships at the Molecular Genetics group at the Leiden Institute of Chemistry, Department of Cell Biology & Genetics at the Erasmus Medical Center and at DSM Food Specialties working on various aspects of molecular biology research. She participated in 2010 in the scientific biology student competition, iGEM, where her team went to Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston for the final. After her studies she co-founded Science Matters, a company that is engaged in knowledge transfer of life sciences. Science Matters developed various projects for different target audiences; amongst others for H2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie grants, Boijmans van Beuningen museum and the Rathenau Instituut. To keep involved in research she joined the group of Prof. dr. Bas van Steensel at the Netherlands Cancer Institute Antoni van Leeuwenhoek in Amsterdam for a PhD study. As a spin-off of her research, the TIDE and TIDER software was developed by Eva in collaboration with Tao Chen and Bas van Steensel and NKI granted an exclusive license hereof to Desktop Genetics in 2018.TIDE and TIDER are web tools for easy assessment of the outcome of CRISPR/Cas genome editing experiments, and now widely used throughout the biomedical research community.

Lecture

Title: Quantitative assessment of genome editing

The efficacy and the mutation spectrum of genome editing methods can vary substantially depending on the targeted sequence. A simple, quick assay to accurately characterize and quantify the induced mutations is therefore needed. We developed TIDE, a fast and cost-effective method that accurately identifies and quantifies insertions and deletions after induction of double strands breaks (DSBs) at defined genomic locations by CRISPR/Cas9 or other genome editing tools. An interactive web tool (available at http://tide.nki.nl) facilitates the rapid testing of the mutagenic consequences of a DSB introduced in a sequence of interest. Recently, we added a new functionality in our TIDE algorithm to estimate the efficiency of the homology-directed repair (HDR) events with a donor template next to the detection of the indels that arise at the break site.

To learn more of the repair kinetics of Cas9-induced breaks in living cells, we developed a strategy to directly measure the kinetics and fidelity of DNA repair at unique loci in human cells. We then use a combination of high throughput sequencing and an assay to detect non-repaired broken ends to quantitate intact, broken and repaired DNA over time. The resulting data are fed into a mathematical model that estimates key parameters of repair kinetics and fidelity. These quantitative analyses will contribute to a better understanding of the process of Cas9-induced genome editing and our web tools greatly facilitates the testing of genome editing strategies.

This work was performed with the following affiliation:

Oncode Institute, Division of Gene Regulation, Netherlands Cancer Institute, Plesmanlaan 121, 1066 CX, Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Current affiliation:

SciLifeLab, Department of Microbiology, Tumor and Cell Biology, Karolinska Institute, Box 1031, SE-‐171 21 Solna, Stockholm, Sweden

 

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Call for nominations

During the BioSB 2019 on April 3, we will present the BioSB Young Investigator Award 2019. The winner will receive a prize of 500 Euros sponsored by the BioSB research school and will be invited to present an honorary lecture in the plenary programme.

Criteria

The candidate must have conducted his/her bioinformatics or systems biology research primarily in a Dutch institute. The primary result on which the award will be based will be the PhD thesis written by the candidate. Therefore, the final version of the thesis of the candidate should have been submitted to the PhD committee at the candidate's university on March 3, 2019 at the latest.

Other criteria that might be considered by the award committee are:

• The candidate significantly contributed to the idea of the research;
• The research of the candidate resulted in novel or improved bioinformatics or systems biology methodologies;
• The research of the candidate advanced life sciences research;
• The candidate independently conducted the research;
• The research resulted in a scientific publication, software application or database;
• The work of the candidate has given broad visibility of bioinformatics or systems biology in the life sciences field;
• The candidate has otherwise significantly contributed to bioinformatics/systems biology or the bioinformatics/systems biology community in the Netherlands.

Procedure

Each nomination must be accompanied with:

• Name and affiliation of candidate
• Motivation for nomination by group leader of candidate
• Curriculum Vitae of the candidate
• A URL to the final version of the PhD thesis (preferably to the PDF of the printed version)

Submission deadline: February 22, 2019

--> Apply here!

 

Award committee

The 2019 members of the award committee are:

• Dick de Ridder, Wageningen University & Research
• Natal van Riel, TU Eindhoven
• Andreas Milias-Argeitis, University of Groningen
• Thomas Abeel, TU Delft

 

Winner of last year's award: Bram Thijssen, Netherlands Cancer Institute