Since October last year I’ve been working as a PhD student at the Theoretical Biology group of the Faculty of Science at Utrecht University. I actually work for the Physiological Chemistry group of Prof. dr. Bos at the Academic Medical Centre, but that’s another story… Below I will explain a bit about what I am doing with my current project. I will try to keep it as uncomplicated as possible.
My project involves studying the evolution of signaling pathways in Eukaryotes and trying to understand specifically the emergence of new signaling pathways. Signaling pathways are a chain of events in the cell, carried out by proteins, which have evolved to ‘let the cell know’ what happens outside of the cell so it can react accordingly.
The observation on which my project is based is the fact that the complex eukaryotes (like us) tend to have had many duplications of key proteins which have gained their own function and regulate different processes. My job, in short, is to find out approximately when, why and how this happened for some specific protein families.
My name is John van Dam and I am a Post-Doc at St. Radboud University Medical Center (NL). My research involves bioinformatics and comparative genomics on cilia and signal transduction pathways.