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dr.ir. J.E. van Dongen (Nienke)

Researcher

About Me

Nienke van Dongen received her BSc and MSc in molecular life sciences from Wageningen University, The Netherlands. During her MSc, she specialized in physical chemistry and took part in the top sector chemistry program for talented students in analytical chemistry (TI-COAST). 

After graduating in 2018, she joined the BIOS lab on a chip group at the University of Twente to start a PhD project on optical cancer biomarker detection on-chip under the supervision of prof. dr. ir. Segerink and prof dr. Eijkel. From November 2022 onwards she works in the same group as a postdoctoral researcher. Her work focusses mainly on integrating CRISPR/Cas biosensing techniques in microfluidic devices to enable cancer biomarker detection in urine. 

Expertise

Medicine & Life Sciences
Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats
Methylation
Tumor Biomarkers
Physics & Astronomy
Deoxyribonucleic Acid
Methylation
Nuclease
Engineering & Materials Science
Methylation
Nucleic Acids

Research

My research focuses on (optical) cancer biomarker detection in urine. However, instead of looking at the color or assessing the taste of the urine, the focus is on the biomarkers present in the urine. Biomarkers are biomolecules that, at certain levels, can indicate whether people are ill, what type of disease they suffer from, and what the stage of the disease is. 

By enabling cancer biomarker detection, I work on two different approaches, namely Plasmonic Detection which covers gold nanoparticle-based techniques for (digital) DNA molecule detection, and CRISPR/Cas Diagnostics, where we focus on the use of the Cas12a protein for the detection of specific tumor-DNA sequences. 

Publications

Recent
Hamacher, T. , Berendsen, J. T. W. , van Dongen, J. E., van der Hee, R. M. , Cornelissen, J. J. L. M., Broekhuijse, M. L. W. J. , & Segerink, L. (2021). Virus removal from semen with a pinched-flow fractionation microfluidic chip. In MicroTAS 2021 - 25th International Conference on Miniaturized Systems for Chemistry and Life Sciences: 10 - 14 October 2021, Palm Springs, CA, USA (pp. 1193-1194). (MicroTAS 2021 - 25th International Conference on Miniaturized Systems for Chemistry and Life Sciences). The Chemical and Biological Microsystems Society.
van Dongen, J. E. , Berendsen, J. T. W. , Eijkel, J. C. T. , & Segerink, L. (2021). Towards a multiplexed barcode CRISPR/Cas12a-Assisted platform for the identification and quantification of singele CpG Methylation Sites. In 25th International Conference on Miniaturized Systems for Chemistry and Life Sciences: 10 - 14 October 2021, Palm Springs, CA, USA (pp. 741-742)
van Dongen, J. E. , Berendsen, J. T. W. , Eijkel, J. C. T. , & Segerink, L. (2021). Towards a Multiplexed Barcode CRISPR/Cas12a-Assisted Platform for the Identification and Quantification of Single CpG Methylation Sites. Poster session presented at 25th International Conference on Miniaturized Systems for Chemistry and Life Sciences, µTAS 2021, Palm Springs, California, United States.

UT Research Information System

Google Scholar Link

Contact Details

Visiting Address

University of Twente
Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science
Carré (building no. 15), room C2405
Hallenweg 21
7522NH  Enschede
The Netherlands

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Mailing Address

University of Twente
Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science
Carré  C2405
P.O. Box 217
7500 AE Enschede
The Netherlands