K. Knoops

Already since his master in biology at the University of Groningen, Kèvin specialized in both light and electron microscopy. Afterwards, he completed his PhD thesis (“Nidovirus replication structures; Hijacking membranes to support viral RNA synthesis”) at the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) in which the replication organelles of Nidoviruses were studied using advanced cellular imaging techniques. Supported by an EMBO long-term fellowship, Kèvin moved to the EMBL in Grenoble in 2010 to study the structure of translating ribosomes with single-particle electron microscopy. In 2012, Kèvin moved back to Groningen and was awarded the Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship as well as the NWO VENI to perform 5 years as post-doc to study the biogenesis and structure of yeast peroxisomes. In 2017, Kèvin finally moved to the Microscopy CORE lab at Maastricht University as microscopy specialist where he currently is responsible for the Light Microscopy section.

Expertises

Microscopy skills
 In vivo (confocal) fluorescence microscopy
 Immune-fluorescence microscopy
 Correlative light- and electron microscopy (CLEM)
 AiryScan, spinning disc and multiphoton microscopy
 Spectral imaging and linear unmixing
 Stimulated emission depletion microscopy (STED)
 High-throughput and –content image processing
 Intensity- and object-based co-localization analysis
 Chemical and cryo-fixation of cells, isolated organelles and protein complexes
 Low-dose imaging
 Freeze-substitution
 Ultra-thin (serial) sectioning
 Immunogold labeling
 Dual-axis electron tomography, reconstruction and modelling
 Electron spectroscopy imaging
 Single-particle EM analysis
 Sub-tomogram averaging
Molecular cell biology skills
 Culturing of bacteria, yeast, mammalian cells and viruses
 Genetic engineering of plasmid and genomic DNA
 Protein and DNA characterization by standard biochemistry methods
 Licensed to work with radionuclides (level 5B) and GMOs, viruses and bacteria at ML-2
 Cell lysate fractionation and gradient floatation
 Protein expression, isolation and purification