News & Lab Life

Congratulations to our PhD student, Elena Jooris, for securing her EMBO fellowship and we are looking forward to collaborating with the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics.

It was so great & fun spending time with you during our last labouting to visit the prehistoric caves. Many thanks to all of you for your enthusiasm and positive attitude ;-)

It was really great hosting Slika Katarina Šapićwave; from the Institute of Molecular Genetics and Genetic Engineering, in the wave of the Erasmus+ program to learn about in vivo infections. We are already missing you. All the best for your next steps, Katarina!

A warm welcome to our new Postdoc, Dr. Mohammed Rizwan Babu Sait. The whole team is looking forward to working with you on your exciting project focused on host-pathogen interactions and A. baumannii virulence.

A warm welcome to our new Postdoc, Dr. Naemi Csoma. What a great project in collaboration with our close colleague, Pr. Joris Messens!

That was really fun ;-) Many thanks to all of you for the great moments. And congrats to Elena for winning the Mario Kart Tournament! Unbeatable! Totally deserved!

Acinetoclub Edition 2025 @ VIB-VUB Center for Structural Biology. This was again a great sharing moment focused on A. baumannii physiology and virulence. Many thanks to all of you.

Congratulations to Florence Thys on securing her Travel Grant to attend the FLAM 2025 conference (Mexico)! And many thanks to the organizers. We wish you a great learning and networking moment.

It was a great Baxerna meeting at Pasteur Institute; delighted to see so much progress!

Congratulations, Safa, for securing your FWO PhD Fellowship. A great achievement. We wish you all the best with your exciting project.

A warm welcome to our new Postdoc, Dr. Frédéric Lauber.

You can be yourself! Everybody is welcome @ the Van der Henst's Lab

The Van der Henst's Lab was present at the "Biology of Acinetobacter XIV" conference @ Niagara Falls, New York, where our Postdoc Alexandra Maure nicely presented her exciting project. Good job! What a great occasion to interact with this vibrant community, we really enjoyed it ;-)

Goodbye, Elsa, and many thanks for your inspirational motivation and for helping us keep the sugar concentration of our blood ;-) All the best for your next steps.

Lab outing 2025: a handy workshop with the whole team at the Chocolate Museum.

A warm welcome to Elena Jooris who is starting a PhD in our lab. We wish you all the best for this exciting project!

Happy Drie Koningen! We enjoyed a nice slice of pie during our labmeeting :)

We are glad to welcome Safa Ben taarit to our team! Wishing you best of luck on your exciting project about the capsule of Acinetobacter baumannii and looking forward to interesting results!

Congrats to Alexandra for presenting her work and exciting observations in front of our colleagues of the VIB-VUB Center for Structural Biology! 

Thank you Sinterklaas! We enjoyed all the sweets :)

Thank you to the Hallez Lab and Muraille Lab for hosting us at UNamur for this year’s Acinetoclub. It was very informative and great discussing with you all!

We welcome Thomas Hofman to the lab! He is joining the team for his Bachelor thesis. We wish you great discoveries.

A huge congrats to Dr. ir. Anke Breine on successfully defending her PhD thesis, what a beautiful accomplishment! We wish you all the best for the next steps in your future.

We warmly welcome our new Master students: Loïc Goffin (in collaboration with the lab of Prof. Steven Ballet) and Sara Loutani (in collaboration with the lab of Prof. Jean-François Flot). We wish you an enriching scientific journey!

Florence and Sarah successfully secured their FWO PhD fellowship. Congratulations from the whole team!

The Van der Henst Lab is always happy to welcome new collaborators and teach them how to work with amoebae and monitor host-pathogen interactions.

The Van der Henst Lab congratulates Emily Vanmarsenille and Yoni De Koster for successfully defending their Master theses! 

We wish you all the best for your next steps!

Acinetoclub 2023 was a real success. A big thank you to Van Melderen’s team for hosting us at ULB.

On behalf of the entire MRDD team, we congratulate Dr. Clémence Whiteway on successfully defending PhD thesis!

Your hard work and dedication have paid off. As you embark on your next journey, we wish you all the best. We’re confident that you’ll continue to achieve great things.

Congratulations! ??

The new official website of the collaborative project BAXERNA was launched.

Visit https://www.baxerna.eu/vib/ for further information!

To welcome the new members of the team, we treated ourselves to breakfast, because everything is better with sweets!

We are pleased, that Florence Thys joined our team as a research staff working on an exciting amoebal project.

Interesting results are coming!

We welcome our new Master's student Emily Vanmarsenille, who will be supervised by Anke Breine.

Good luck with the thesis project!

We were happy to host Dr. Iva Sukkar from CEITEC VETUNI (Czech Republic) who visited us for three weeks and learned new techniques on the phenotyping of Acinetobacter baumannii. 

Well done and good luck with your future projects!

Congratulations to Anke Breine and Juliette van Buylaere on the wonderful talks they delivered during the 13th Symposium on the Biology of Acinetobacter in Coimbra!

Great work!

We had a great time during the teambuilding in Porto and the subsequent 13th Symposium on the Biology of Acinetobacter in Coimbra!

Thank you, everyone!

The Van der Henst Lab is proud to announce co-securing a European-level grant of more than 8 million euros to develop a new vaccine technology against bacterial infections caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis, Mycobacterium ulcerans and Acinetobacter baumannii. In a consortium called "Baxerna," VIB, UGent, Ghent University Hospital, VUB, ULB, the Pasteur Institute, the Radboud Medical Center and the Karolinska Institute, led by Profs. Lennart Martens and Francis Impens (VIB-Ghent University Center for Medical Biotechnology) will search for new antibacterial mRNA vaccines as a preventive tool in the fight against antimicrobial resistance.

Looking forward to the exciting collaboration! 

One of the projects from the Van der Henst Lab, the Acinetobase, being presented at the Annual Conference of the Microbiology Society in Birmingham by Dr. Adam Valcek. 

Well done!

The lab cleaning day with a tasty reward.

Good job, everyone!

It was great to host Bálint Eszenyi of the Bálint Kintses Laboratory (Synthetic and Systems Biology Unit, Biological Research Centre, Szeged, Hungary).

We learned a lot about working with phages and looking forward to future collaborations!

We are delighted to welcome our new Postdoc, Dr. Alexandra Maure, who will study the host-pathogen interactions of A. baumannii bacteria.

All the best in your work, Alexandra!

The entire Van der Henst Lab attended the end-of-the-year brunch and it was delicious!

Thank you for a wonderful year and all your hard work!

The Van der Henst Lab welcomes our new lab technician Steven Van Meerbeek!

We are looking forward to all the wonderful results to come!

The Van der Henst Lab is hosting the yearly "Research Rotation 1" with 7 VUB students.

We wish you a nice learning curve!

Dr. Etienne Robino finished his postdoc in the Van der Henst Lab after two years of exciting work on host-pathogen interactions using amoebae.

We wish him all the best for his future career path!

The first Lab day 2022 of the Van der Henst Lab with scientific discussion, food and a forest walk. The entire team had a wonderful day.

We thank Charles Van der Henst for hosting us at his place!

The VIB Seminar 2022 in Genk was full of enlightening talks and great fun during the team building!

The Van der Henst Lab is happy to welcome Juliette Van Buylaere who joined us as research staff.

We wish you the best of luck!

The Van der Henst Lab is happy to welcome two new Master's students Matteo Molinari and Yoni De Koster.

Best of luck to both of you!

Congratulations to PhD student Clémence Whiteway for being selected for the EMBO-FEBS Lecture Course "The new microbiology" in Spetses, Greece!

Good luck and have a great time!

Congratulations to PhD student Anke Breine for being selected to give a talk at Gordon Research Seminar on Bacterial Cell Surfaces about "Targeting Multidrug-resistant A. baumannii to Develop Next-generation Antibiotics".

Great work!

The Van der Henst Lab welcomes a visit from the Govers Lab (KU Leuven), prof. Sander Govers.

A day full of exciting talks with a nice afternoon!

Dr. Adam Valcek was awarded a 3-year postdoctoral fellowship by the FWO to explore the Influence of major surface structures and plasmidome on non-antibiotic resistance of Acinetobacter baumannii.

Congratulations!

First post-COVID lab outing of the MRDD Team.

What a great time!

We are delighted to welcome our new Postdoc Dr. Kristína Nesporova and wanted to thank the Erasmus+ programme (EU) for this great opportunity !

Very motivated to welcome 9 junior students in the frame of the VUB Research Rotations. A big thank to Adam, Clémence & Juliette for your time & energy in this great organization !

Welcome to our two new Master students, Juliette Van Buylaere and Audrey Vantorre. We wish you both to conduct your project efficiently while learning from our lab.

Delighted to welcome our new postdoc, Dr. Adam Valcek, in our team. Looking forwards to your bioinformatic analyzes on our favorite bug. We wish you all the best for your project Adam !

A warm welcome to our new Postdoc, Dr. Etienne Robino, who will push forwards amoebae as versatile cellular infection models to study A. baumannii bacteria. All the very best from the whole team Etienne !

Congratulation to our two PhD students, Clémence Whiteway & Anke Breine, on the acceptance of your abstracts for two oral communications to the Belgian Society for Microbiology conference (https://belsocmicrobio.be). Looking forwards to hearing you !

We are very happy and delighted to learn that our new PhD student Anke Breine received the PhD Fellowship Strategic Basic Research from FWO. Congratulations from the whole team and we wish you all the best for your exciting project !

A warm welcome to our new Master students Anitha Ravi and Victor De Pillecyn. We wish you both a constructive learning phase in our team.