Postdoc
Joined the Hollfelder group: 01 October 2001, returned 18 May 2009
Background and Current Projects: Liisa graduated Summa cum Laude from Bowdoin College, Maine, USA, with a B.A. in Biochemistry and Spanish. Her Honours research project was on 'Prebiotic Phosphorylation of Nucleosides'.
She was the first to join the FH Group in October 2001 and worked on DNA Gyrase kinetics for her M.Phil. During her PhD she studied derivatised PEI as gene therapy reagents. After as short post-doc on the same project and one year working for Accenture as a business consultant, Liisa returned to the Hollfelder group for a postdoc in microdroplets or microfluidics working on projects relating to drug selectivity and drug screening. In October 2009, Liisa was awarded a one-year Enterprise Fellowship by the Royal Society of Edinburgh/ BBSRC to commercialise a micro-droplet drug screening system. She developped this system as a post-doc in collaboration with teams from Imperial College London. With Fabrice Gielen and Florian Hollfelder, Liisa is also co-founder of Drop-Tech Ltd, a spin-out that developed an automated droplet generator (the Mitos Dropix, sold by Dolomite Microfluidics) and provides consultancy and installations of microfluidic droplet systems. Liisa manages the lab's two EU Networks and her main project is the development of a microfluidc assay for the detection of amyloid seeds from clinical blood samples and the measurement of their propensity to aggregate with the aim of using the assay as a tool for early diagnosis. She also teaches Innovation & Entrepreneurship workshops for various EU networks, St John's College and the i2i programme at Cranfield University.
Interests: Liisa gets away from the lab to go for walks in nature (no real hiking in the UK), do yoga or ride horses, specializing in Dressage but has also competed in jumping as well as volting, she recently got back into sailing with classic yacht regattas and summer sailing trips. She enjoys singing choral music and founded Cadenza, the Cambridge University A Capella group. She's been known to organise lab trips that involve travelling, skiing and cooking...
Publications
[16] Collins, S.; van Vliet, L. D.; Gielen, F.; Kanecek, M.; Wagner-Valladolid, S.; Poudel, C.; Fusco, G.; de Simone, A.; Michel, C.; Kaminski, C. F.; Spring, D. R.; Hollfelder, F.; Kaminski Schierle, G. A unified in vitro to in vivo fluorescence lifetime screening platform yields amyloid β aggregation inhibitors. bioRxiv 2022.
[15] Neun, S.; van Vliet, L.; Hollfelder, F.; Gielen, F. High-Throughput Steady-State Enzyme Kinetics Measured in a Parallel Droplet Generation and Absorbance Detection Platform. Anal Chem 2022, 94, 16701-16710. Link
[14] Che Fai Alex Wong, Liisa van Vliet, Swapnil Vilas Bhujbal, Chengzhi Guo, Marit Sletmoen, Bjørn Torger Stokke, Florian Hollfelder, and Rahmi Lale. A Titratable Cell Lysis-on-Demand System for Droplet-Compartmentalized Ultrahigh-Throughput Screening in Functional Metagenomics and Directed Evolution. ACS Synthetic Biology (8), 1882-1894 (2021). Link
[13] Alexandra S. Tauzin, Mariana Rangel Pereira, Liisa D. Van Vliet, Pierre-Yves Colin, Elisabeth Laville, Jeremy Esque, Sandrine Laguerre, Bernard Henrissat, Nicolas Terrapon, Vincent Lombard, Marion Leclerc, Joël Doré, Florian Hollfelder & Gabrielle Potocki-Veronese. Investigating host-microbiome interactions by droplet based microfluidics. Microbiome141 (2020).Link
[12] Liisa D. van Vliet and Florian Hollfelder (2020). Microfluidic Droplets and Their Applications: Diagnosis, Drug Screening and the Discovery of Therapeutic Enzymes. Book chapter in: Van Toi V., Le T., Ngo H., Nguyen TH. (eds) 7th International Conference on the Development of Biomedical Engineering in Vietnam (BME7). BME 2018. IFMBE Proceedings, vol 69. Springer, Singapore. Link.
[11] Tomas Buryska, Michal Vasina, Fabrice Gielen, Pavel Vanacek, Liisa van Vliet, Jan Jezek, Zdenek Pilat, Pavel Zemanek, Jiri Damborsky, Florian Hollfelder, and Zbynek Prokop. Controlled Oil/Water Partitioning of Hydrophobic Substrates Extending the Bioanalytical Applications of Droplet-Based Microfluidics. Anal. Chem. 2019, 91, 15, 10008–10015. DOI 10.1021/acs.analchem.9b01839Link
[10] Hans Kleine-Brüggeney, Liisa D. van Vliet, Carla Mulas, Fabrice Gielen, Chibeza C. Agley, José C. R. Silva, Austin Smith, Kevin Chalut, Florian Hollfelder. Long-Term Perfusion Culture of Monoclonal Embryonic Stem Cells in 3D Hydrogel Beads for Continuous Optical Analysis of Differentiation. Small 2019, 15, 1804576. Link
[9] Elizabeth Bilsland, Liisa van Vliet, Kevin Williams, Jack Feltham, Marta P. Carrasco, Wesley L. Fotoran, Eliana F. G. Cubillos, Gerhard Wunderlich, Morten Grøtli, Florian Hollfelder, Victoria Jackson, Ross D. King, Stephen G. Oliver. Plasmodium dihydrofolate reductase is a second enzyme target for the antimalarial action of triclosan. Scientific Reports (2018); 8(1):1038. Link
[8] Liisa D. van Vliet, Pierre Yves Colin, Florian Hollfelder. Bioinspired genotype–phenotype linkages: mimicking cellular compartmentalization for the engineering of functional proteins. Interface Focus (2015); 5(4): 20150035. Link
[7] Fabrice Gielen, Tomas Buryska, Liisa D. Van Vliet, Maren Butz, Jiri Damborsky, Zbynek Prokop, Florian Hollfelder. Interfacing microwells with nanoliter compartments: a sampler generating high-resolution concentration gradients for quantitative biochemical analyses in droplets. Analytical Chemistry (2015); 87(1): 624-32. Link
[6] Fabrice Gielen, Liisa D. Van Vliet, Bartosz Koprowski, Sean R.A. Devenish, Martin Fischlechner, Joshua B. Edel, Xize Niu, Andrew J. deMello, Florian Hollfelder. A Fully Unsupervised Compartment-on-demand Platform for Precise Nanolitre Assays of Time-Dependent Steady-State Enzyme Kinetics and Inhibition, Analytical Chemistry (2013); 85(9): 4761-4769. Link
[5] Balint Kintses, Liisa D. van Vliet, Sean R.A. Devenish, Florian Hollfelder. Microfluidic droplets: new integrated workflows for biological experiments. Current opinion in chemical biology. (2010); 14(5): 548-55. Link
[4] Liisa D. Van Vliet, Michael R. Chapman, Frédéric Avenier, Chris Z. Kitson, Florian Hollfelder. A tunable system for efficient gene transfection. ChemBioChem (2008); 9(12): 1960-7. Link
[3] Frédéric Avenier, Josiel B. Domingos, Liisa D. Van Vliet, Florian Hollfelder. Polyethylene Imine Derivatives ('Synzymes') Accelerate Phosphate Transfer in the Absence of Metal. Journal of the American Chemical Society (2007);129(24): 7611-9. Link
[2] Liisa D. Van Vliet, Tom Ellis, Patrick J. Foley, Ligong Liu, Frederick M. Pfeffer, Richard A. Russell, Ronald N. Warrener, Florian Hollfelder, Michael J. Waring. Molecular Recognition of DNA by Rigid [n]-Polynorbornane-Derived Bifunctional Intercalators: Synthesis and Evaluation of their Binding Properties. Journal of Medicinal Chemistry (2007); 50(10): 2326-40. Link
[1] Nabil Asaad, John E. Davies, David R. W. Hodgson and Anthony J. Kirby, Liisa Van Vliet, Laura Ottavi. The search for efficient intramolecular proton transfer from carbon: the kinetically silent intra-molecular general base catalysed elimination reaction of O-phenyl peri-dimethylamino-1-naphthaldoximes. Journal of Physical Organic Chemistry (2005); 8(2): 101-109. Link
