Cees Dekker of TU Delft has been awarded a European Research Council Advanced Grant of €2.5 million for research at the interface of biology and nanotechnology. The money will fund a project to study the behaviour of bacteria in specially manufactured “nanolandscapes”, which Dekker describes as a Galapagos Islands for bacteria.
Using nano-manufacturing techniques Dekker aims to build precisely defined environments on a chip and then use these to study the evolution and adaptation of bacteria in response to changes in these environments.
In effect, says Dekker, this will make it possible to study the evolution of bacteria in real time, and how the adapt to changing environmental factors.
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