{ "title": "The very first cell division - Meet Tom Dendooven", "modified_at": "2026-04-15 08:00:03", "published_at": "2026-04-15 08:00:00", "url": "https://blog.vib.be/the-very-first-cell-division-meet-tom-dendooven", "short_url": "http://prez.ly/bHBd", "culture": "en", "language": "EN", "subtitle": "Following a PhD and postdoc at Cambridge, Tom Dendooven recently joined the VIB-VUB Center for Structural Biology as group leader. Backed by an ERC Starting Grant, his research tackles sperm development and how this goes awry in male infertility. Vita Cooman and Florence Thys (both PhD students at CSB) ask him a some questions, ranging from moving abroad to his favorite beer.", "slug": "the-very-first-cell-division-meet-tom-dendooven", "body": "

Hello, Tom. Welcome to the VUB-VIB Center for Structural Biology. How have you liked your first months in the center so far?

Hello, and thank you! The first few months have been quite intense, but also very rewarding. At the moment, I’m busy setting up the lab: buying equipment, hiring PhD students and postdocs, and so on, which is taking up most of my time. But I feel well supported by VIB and I’m excited to start doing the science.

And what is your first impression of the center?

When you move from one institute to another, there is always a big change, because every institute has its own way of organizing and running things. So I have been adapting over the last few months, but I really like the center. What I am really starting to appreciate is the diversity of research topics we have here at CSB. You have these hardcore cryo-EM groups working on tiny membrane proteins, paired with groups doing de novo protein design, working on multidrug resistance, or even studying and designing entirely new classes of biomaterials, just to name a few. I really hope that, in the future, my research program on fertility will also become another strong pillar within this diverse research center.

We hope so too, of course! Thus far, you’ve had a very interesting research trajectory at a variety of centers. You did your master’s thesis at KU Leuven under the supervision of Rob Lavigne, for which you were nominated for the Vlaamse Scriptieprijs. From there, you moved straight to Cambridge to pursue your academic career further. Could you describe what your experience of moving abroad was like?

Yes, indeed. I did my master’s in Belgium, working on a small phage protein called DIP, or Degradosome Interacting Protein, which hijacks its bacterial host’s RNA metabolism. As part of this thesis, I had the opportunity to spend three or four months during the summer of 2015 in the UK, in the lab of Ben Luisi, where I learned X-ray crystallography. That was actually my first visit to the UK. After that, I came back to Belgium to finish my master’s degree.

However, it was always the plan to move abroad for a PhD, and that is exactly what I did. About a month after graduating, I moved back to the UK permanently to start a PhD, again with Ben Luisi, at the University of Cambridge. There, I used cryo-electron microscopy to study RNA degradation machinery and translation-inhibition machinery in multidrug-resistant bacteria. After my PhD, I stayed in Cambridge but moved to the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology as a postdoc in David Barford’s lab to study the molecular machinery that organizes chromosome segregation during cell division, and later joined Matteo Allegretti’s group to start working on human gametes.

Would you recommend making a similar move to other young researchers?

I would definitely encourage early-career academics to spend some time working abroad at some point in their careers. If not for a PhD, then for a postdoc. I think it is very good for your personal growth, but also for your career, to get out of your comfort zone and move to a different country. Even if, as in the UK, the culture is relatively similar to your own, it can still be very enriching to start anew and reorganize your life from scratch.

And what are your tips for people who are planning to make a similar move?

Well, firstly, I think it is good to do this early in your career, because the older you get, the more rooted you become in your environment, and the more difficult it can be to move abroad. My advice for people who want to move is to be proactive and create opportunities for yourself. If there are labs in other countries doing research that you find interesting, contact them and let them know you are interested in joining the lab. Even if they do not have a position available at that moment, group leaders tend to appreciate and remember people who are proactive and who reach out. It helps you get a foot in the door.

Thanks for the advice! What then motivated you to come back to Belgium and join VIB?

For both my partner and me, the plan was always to come back to Belgium at some point. What was less clear was when and how we would make that move. Luckily, almost three years ago, I got in touch with Han Remaut and Jan Steyaert, the directors of CSB. They told me they were very interested in bringing someone with expertise in cryo-electron tomography to the center to expand the cryo-EM capabilities at the center.

At that point, as a postdoc at the MRC-LMB, I was using this technique extensively to study cell division and male fertility with David Barford and Matteo Allegretti. So this encounter presented a great opportunity for me to return to Belgium, and that really got the ball rolling. VIB is the perfect institute for me to pursue my research goals in unraveling the molecular biology behind (in)fertility. It is the center of expertise for structural biology in Belgium, and we are also in close proximity to internationally renowned fertility clinics and research institutes such as Brussels IVF and VUB GRAD, the Genetics, Reproduction and Development Research Group, with whom I will collaborate.

You already touched on it a little in your previous answer, but your research focuses on male fertility and cryo-electron tomography. Could you tell us a little more about this technique, and especially how you came to fall in love with it and use it so well?

Yes, of course! Actually, cryo-electron tomography is not a very difficult technique to understand. It is a method in which we use a high-end transmission electron microscope, like the one we have here at the center, to look inside vitrified cells or tissues. This essentially allows us to visualize the molecular machines operating inside these cells at extraordinary resolution, to the point where we can start building atomic structures as they appear in the cell. That, in turn, allows us to deduce how they operate in their native environment.

It is a fantastic tool for discovery science, because there is almost nothing you cannot see with an electron microscope. That is exactly why I love this technique and why I chose it to study male fertility.

How did you come to focus on that as your research topic?

During my postdoc, I was studying the molecular machinery that makes chromosomes segregate into two daughter cells during each cell division. Through this work, I became more and more interested in perhaps the most fascinating and most important cell division of our lifetime: the very first one. That first cell division, which occurs right after fertilization, is unique. Sadly, it is also at this stage that things often go wrong in cases of unexplained infertility.

As I read more of the literature, I noticed that we know very little about the molecular biology of sperm cells and oocytes, which carry all the machinery to orchestrate that first cell division. I believe that cryo-ET is the perfect technique to fill that gap, because it allows us to study molecular biology simply by looking directly inside, for example, a healthy sperm cell or, conversely, an infertile sperm cell.

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And besides cryo-ET, what other new techniques would you like to use to study this topic?

Good question! We aim to use complementary techniques to answer our research questions. One exciting technique that is gaining ground is expansion microscopy. This is a very elegant way to do super-resolution light microscopy without actually having to perform super-resolution microscopy. Essentially, you stain your sample and then expand it four- to tenfold in a hydrogel, after which you can use conventional confocal microscopy to study the cells and the epitopes you tagged at roughly 50 nm resolution.

Another technique that I think is incredibly powerful is cross-linking mass spectrometry, not just of protein assemblies, but of whole cells, so that we can get an idea of the interactome of an entire cell. With this technique, we can really see which protein assemblies interact, and how they interact, at the molecular level. I think that, in the future, combining this with AlphaFold-derived structure prediction tools to visualize these interactions could provide a holistic snapshot of how cells operate.

During my postdoc, I had the opportunity to collaborate with Juri Rappsilber from Berlin. He is not only a global pioneer in whole-cell cross-linking mass spectrometry, but also a very engaging scientist. I would be very keen to collaborate with him again in the future if possible. He has a very inspiring vision of where the field of molecular biology is going, and where it should go, and I really enjoyed collaborating and interacting with him.

I also admire the work of Virginie Hamel and Paul Guichard. They are pioneers in the other technique I mentioned earlier, expansion microscopy. Since I do not yet know how to do expansion microscopy properly, I am hoping that my group and I will have the opportunity to learn directly from them in the near future.

Let’s also dive a little into your more non-scientific interests. We’ve heard a rumor going around the center that you like to experiment with brewing your own beer. Is this true?

These rumors are true indeed! Together with two friends, I recently started a small Geuze stekerij. Geuze is a famous type of sour beer fermented with wild yeast and bacteria. We buy Lambic wort from Lambic breweries and put it into large wooden barrels to ferment and age for one, two or three years, before blending it into a Geuze or a fruit beer. We started by buying our first ten barrels, which allows us to produce just over 2,000 litres now. But it is very early days, we are still learning.

And where did this interest in Geuze come from?

Probably from drinking it (laughs). Actually, the answer is a bit more historical than that. I am originally from Overijse, in the 'IJse valley', which, a long time ago, was an area where people brewed Lambic and made Geuze. Today, no one there does it anymore, and most Geuze brewing takes place in the Zenne valley, in the Pajottenland. My friends and I would like to bring it back to our region and revive that tradition.

We hope to taste it one day! Let’s end with one last non-scientific question. We asked ChatGPT to give us some fun facts about you and to describe you, and it gave us the following response: “Tom Dendooven, a top scientist at the VIB-VUB Center for Structural Biology, balances his groundbreaking cryo-ET research with an adrenaline-fueled hobby life: he’s an avid drummer, a skilled martial artist, and a dedicated runner, making him a master of both the microscopic world and the physical arts.” Could you please fact-check this for us?

It is interesting how much ChatGPT seems to know, and how good it is at pleasing the reader. I guess the answer is broadly correct, but ChatGPT is definitely overestimating me. I certainly would not call myself a top scientist yet — I only started a few months ago as a group leader, and there is still a great deal I have to learn. That being said, I do aspire to do groundbreaking cryo-ET research in the coming years. Time will tell.

As for my “adrenaline-fueled hobby life,” I have to say that these days it does not feel very adrenaline-fueled, because I have two young kids who take up most of my free time. I did play the drums a lot when I was younger, and I have done judo for pretty much my entire life. I am not sure that qualifies me as a skilled martial artist, though (laughs). As for being a dedicated runner, that one is not true. I picked up running during the COVID pandemic, as many people did, but these days I run once every two weeks, calling me dedicated would be a stretch.

Thanks, Tom!

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\"Vita
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\n Vita Cooman\n PhD student at CSB\n \n
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\"Florence
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\n Florence Thys\n PhD student at CSB\n \n
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