Ewoud Sanders is best known for his weekly column WoordHoek (‘Word Corner’) in the newspaper NRC Handelsblad where he writes about the history of Dutch words and expressions.
He is on a quest to improve digital access to printed Dutch language resources and his pamphlet Eerste Hulp Bij e-Onderzoek (‘First Aid for e-Research’) has been reprinted 16 times and distributed free of charge to students by several Dutch institutes of higher learning. In 2011, Google gave him a grant of $15,000 to help improve internet searching in the Netherlands.
The Bibliome group at the French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA) has developed a text-mining application that extracts fine information about seed development from thousands of texts. It gives scientists better and quicker access to how molecules, genes and proteins interact when a seed starts to grow.
Good Seed Makes a Good Crop
Inside a seed are components such as molecules, genes and proteins. The presence of these components and how they interact determines if a particular seed can be used for human or animal consumption or by industry. A better understanding of seed biology and development is therefore important for both crop breeders and industrial companies. Finding out which genes interact with which protein in which tissue at which stage is a key question for researchers in plant breeding.
Ewoud Sanders is best known for his weekly column WoordHoek (‘Word Corner’) in the newspaper NRC Handelsblad where he writes about the history of Dutch words and expressions.