One Health PACT / Avans – Lab-student: Bart Geluk

Sixteen 3rd year Biology and Laboratorial Research students are working on OHPACT-related projects within Avans under the supervision of teachers with OHPACT as their client. Within this part of the curriculum of the bachelor education, project based learning is essential. Together with University Utrecht (Judith van den Brand, Giuseppe Giglia, Gianfilippo Agliani) students are unravelling the role of apoptosis in Usutu virus positive blackbirds. In addition, within the collaboration with Erasmus MC (Bas Oudemunnink, Emmanuelle Munger, Reina Sikkema), students are contributing to the development of a fieldable assay for the detection of vector-borne viruses from wildlife and clinical samples and optimizing the CO1 PCR for ticks species identification. In association with the LUMC (Louie Krol), students are investigating if the Culex pipiens-complex DNA can be detected in the guts of known mosquito predators using qPCR.

Who are these students? In the upcoming weeks we will share with you who are these students and on which topics they will focus.

Who am I?

Hello, my name is Bart Geluk, and I am a third-year student at the Avans academy of technology, Health and Milieu, ATGM for short. I am 19 years old, and I’m currently studying Biomedical lab research.

What subject will I be focussing on this semester? What will I be researching?

Currently, I am doing a specialisation called patient-oriented research, where I’m optimising a new fieldable method of detecting different kinds of Arboviruses with a technique called Recombinase Polymerase Amplification. This all is done to help the OH-PACT project.

What would I like to learn?

ISince the Sars-COVID pandemic, I have begun to become more interested in viruses. And now that the opportunity has come to work with viruses, I want to work even more with them. Maybe in the future, I’ll help develop new methods of detecting viruses and more ways to fight virus outbreaks. But who knows, only the future probably.

What do I want to do with this in the future?

This is my first time trying to optimise a new technique such as Recombinase Polymerase Amplification. So I’m hoping that this experience will come in handy for next year when I’m going to an internship.

LinkedIn profile: linkedin.com/in/bart-geluk-919b5a207

I will now pass the baton to Sam van der Ploeg.