"My research focuses on molecular mechanisms underlying embryonic development. In particular, I am interested in protein phosphorylation on tyrosine residues, which acts like a molecular switch. Protein-tyrosine kinases (PTKs) add phosphate to substrate proteins and protein-tyrosine phosphatases (PTPs) remove the phosphate, thus reversibly modulating target protein function. Practically all biological processes are regulated by tyrosine phosphorylation. We contributed to better understanding of the regulation of PTPs and more recently to understanding the function of PTPs in embryonic development and disease using zebrafish embryos as a model.
A second interest of the lab is aimed at identification of biologically active compounds. We generated and screened a library of supernatants from fungi using zebrafish embryogenesis as a read-out. Many strains of fungi reproducibly affected zebrafish embryogenesis. We identified more than 100 compounds that induced specific developmental defects and may thus represent lead compounds for drug discovery.
I got to know about the Lorentz Center many years ago when Herman Spaink organized a Lorentz Center workshop as a satellite meeting of the European Zebrafish meeting that I co-organized in Amsterdam in 2007. This workshop turned out to be the first in a series of meetings that is still running successfully as the annual meeting of the Zebrafish Disease Models Society. When I was asked to join the Medical and Life Sciences board of the Lorentz Center, I did not hesitate to accept. The evaluation of the diversity of proposals that are submitted to the Lorentz Center is an interesting process. I would love to drop in at some of the workshops on subjects that are far-removed from my daily science!
Prof. dr. Jeroen den Hertog is group leader and managing director at the Hubrecht Institute for molecular and developmental biology in Utrecht; professor of molecular developmental zoology at the Institute of Biology Leiden at Leiden University.
