The FORCE project aims to understand the ultimate and proximate causes of change in Caribbean coral reef ecosystems. Eutrophication through runoff of terrestrial nutrients into coastal waters may cause a shift from coral dominance to macroalgae. However, the role of phytoplankton in absorbing nutrients has largely been under-appreciated. Phytoplankton often responds rapidly to changes in nutrient availability and may utilise much of the terrestrial nutrients, rendering them unavailable to corals and macroalgae. To date, nutrient thresholds indicating problematic levels of eutrophication of coral reefs have been proposed, but their relevance is questionable. Our study will investigate how the nutrient influx is allocated over phytoplankton, macroalgae and corals to obtain a better understanding of the impacts of eutrophication on coral reefs.

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Three types of fellowships are offered for the programme MSc Food Technology at Wageningen University, the Netherlands:

• Food Valley Ambassadors Fellowship
• DST Fellowships
• European Masters Fellowships

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As a PhD student in the Department of Parasitology, you will join a research group investigating cellular immunology of parasitic infections. It has been found that parasitic helminth infections have a profound immune modulatory effect on the host immune system leading to altered immune responses to parasite-derived and bystander antigens. The research interest of the group lies in detailed molecular mechanisms by which helminth-derived molecules interact with specific cells of the immune system and alter signalling and function of these target cells. Dendritic cells are central to the control of immune responses and form one of the major cells that are being studied as targets of modulation by helminth-derived molecules. The specific PhD project “Parasitic helminthes: the characterization of immune modulatory molecules and mechanisms” is part of an international collaborative network that investigates how helminth-derived excretory-secretory molecules modulate the immune system in vitro and in vivo.

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The project is a collaborative effort of the laboratories of Paediatrics and Neurology (Prof. Wevers, Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre) and Analytical Chemistry / Chemometrics (Prof. Buydens, Institute of Molecules and Materials, Radboud University Nijmegen).

Complex data are currently being measured at an ever increasing rate, to the extent that the data analysis has become the rate-limiting step.

In this project, you will set up and improve data analysis strategies, using chemometrics and multivariate statistics to analyse large numbers of NMR spectra of patients with metabolic diseases. The aims of the analyses include quality control, biomarker identification and disease classification.

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