Taco Kooij

Parasitologist Taco Kooij examines the complex biology of malaria parasites

Of all the interviews I’ve conducted, Dr. Taco Kooij is the person I’ve known the longest. We first met back in 2007 at Heidelberg University in Germany, when I was a Master’s student and Taco was a postdoc in a different lab. I still remember how friendly and approachable he was—traits that, nearly two decades later, remain unchanged. Everything else, however, has evolved a lot. Taco is now an assistant professor and leads his own laboratory at Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen (Netherlands). There, he and his team investigate the fundamental biology of the malaria parasites and how it moves between hosts. A central focus of his research lies in two cell organelles the single-celled parasite has acquired through endosymbiosis: the mitochondrion and the apicoplast. These organelles are not only functionally unique but also represent promising targets for intervention.

Beyond his impressive work as a scientist, Taco is also an exceptional photographer who expertly captures the beauty of nature. Together with the members of his lab, he also skillfully bridges the gap between the bench and the broader public by transforming the complex research his team conducts every day into beautiful short videos, striking micrographs and other exciting endeavors.

After three years in the making, I was delighted to sit down with Taco during the lively celebration of the Nijmeegse Vierdaagse to talk about science, art, and life itself.

Can you please share a bit about your personal background? Where did you grow up, and when did you realize that a career in science was your calling?

I was born in the Netherlands in the west side of the country right between the tulips and the smoke of Amsterdam and The Hague. When I was about nine years old, we moved to the east side of the country to a tiny farmers village with no more than 200 inhabitants before moving to the town where I grew up as a teenager.

As a kid I had two big heroes. One was the Dutch biologist Midas Dekkers who had a wonderful book in which he presented all sorts of experiments. As a little boy I particularly enjoyed the one where I had to catch my own farts in a jar while sitting in the bath tub. By collecting several and writing down my last meal on it, it allowed me to compare the smell different diets produce. My other hero was David Attenborough. I loved his television series “Life on Earth.”

So already from childhood I wanted to be a biologist. At the time, I thought it was going to be sitting in a rubber boat with a camera chasing whales and taking pictures. When I was in high school, I was introduced to chemistry. From that moment, I knew I wanted to study the chemistry of life. I was fascinated by how even my own thoughts and feelings were the result of these tiny molecules.

How has your academic journey unfolded from your early university days to where you are now?

I studied chemistry at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands. I did an internship in organic synthesis of antibiotics at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow and for my master’s degree I worked in Utrecht at the boundary of chemistry and biology studying lipid peroxidation and doing a lot of microscopy work. Next, I did my PhD on molecular biology and comparative genomics of malaria parasites at the Leiden University Medical Center in the group of Andy Waters and Chris Janse. During that time, I also attended the Biology of Parasitism (BoP) course in Woods Hole, a career-shaping summer school famous amongst parasitologist.

I did a postdoc at Oxford with Dave Roberts for three years and then went to Heidelberg on an EMBO fellowship to work with Kai Matuschewski for two years. When he went to the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin, I joined him and stayed there for another five years as a senior researcher. In 2014, I was awarded a Vidi award of the Dutch funding body NWO, that allowed me to establish my own team in Nijmegen at the Radboud University Medical Center where I still work today.

Could you please describe the research focus of your malaria lab: host transitions/prophylactic and transmission-blocking intervention strategies?

The focus is really on malaria parasite biology. We do venture into drug development when opportunities arise but our main drive is really understanding biology, particularly during transmission. When the parasite changes dramatically its form, shape and morphology to adapt to the different environments. These are bottlenecks where we can more easily target the parasite, plus they are poorly understood compared to the asexual blood stages. I think we still have a lot to gain from small increments of knowledge, even for translational work.

I find evolution in general fascinating and the evolution of the eukaryotic cell in particular. The malaria parasite is a wonderful example and I think that we can learn a lot from this unconventional model system. This is my main personal drive. This is also one of the reasons why we have a strong focus on the mitochondrion and apicoplast, two so-called endosymbiotic organelles. These are little “chambers” of the cell that originate from peculiar events in a long-forgotten past when the host cell engulfed another living cell that started living inside it. Thus the mitochondrion once was a bacterium, whereas the apicoplast stems from a photsynthetic red algae. Over time the two cells got entirely interdependent and the engulfed cell got slowly incorporated into the host cell, loosing it’s ability to live outside. The resulting organelles are now integral and essential parts of the host cell but they retain a tiny bit of their own DNA thus revealing a little of their history.

There is a lot of diversity of how the mitochondrion and apicoplast have evolved in different species. Thus, the apicoplast remains photosynthetically active in free-living species, while it has lost its capacity to conduct photosynthesis in parasites completely. In some species the organelle has been lost altogether, though some of the plant-like genes can still be found in the parasite’s genome. In addition to their fascinating origins, these organelles are excellent and validated drug targets that I think we can exploit more.

Do you have any key milestones in your career that you’re especially proud of?

One was finally becoming, after many years, independent when I got my Vidi grant, which is basically the Dutch version (and the model for) the ERC Consolidator grant. This allowed me to set up my own lab. Another was being elected for the EMBO Young Investigator Programme (YIP), even though I had only just returned from conquering leukemia. I was diagnosed after donating blood and they caught it early. I think I am most proud of beating this terrible disease, which somehow even helped to enrich my career. I have become a total package scientist, and I am still sitting here doing the same work.

What sparked the creativity of your laboratory and is there anything that we can look forward to in the future?

I do have a fondness for art in general and particularly scientific art. In the lab, we typically start off using experimental genetics to modify the parasite’s genome. The next thing we do is to throw them under as many different microscopes that we can get our hands on to describe what we see. In my opinion, descriptive science is underappreciated and besides some stages of the parasite just look stunningly beautiful. I love it that I can combine science and beauty in my work, that is amazing. This is why I have always had a strong focus on microscopy.

In terms of the website, we are hopelessly behind with getting it up to date. Fortunately, several past and current members of my team share my enthusiasm for the art of science or like to share their work and knowledge beyond academia. Combining that is wonderful. For example, Cas Boshoven, a former PhD candidate graduating in October makes fantastic videos. I thought they were real fun to make, and they are also very accessible for the general public.

Laura Akkerman is a current PhD candidate in my team who likes to be active in public outreach such as TED talks or science cafes. On a couple of different occasions, she has given superb talks in which she explained very complicated topics, for example the apicoplast and drug target development, in a way that was easy to understand for anyone. She is now starting a new blog for our institute in which she wants to explore and celebrate failures of people in the lab. Everybody always celebrates successes and Nature papers but there are many more failures than Nature publications. We also like to celebrate our mistakes and even have a prize in the lab that is dedicated to failure. The award is changing hands very quickly because people make stupid mistakes all the time. The last time I won it because I spend an hour or so measuring the room for our new microscope after which I threw the note with all measures away with the old paper. The award is an ugly looking thing made of lab plastic waste, but it is an honor to be the holder of the cup.

In the past few years I have had a lot of fun writing haikus, a rather restrictive Japanese poem style. A haiku should consist of three lines of five, then seven, and again five syllables. That is it. Also, it is supposed to describe something you see or something sensory in a way that other people, by just reading it, picture something in their minds and then ideally the last line also should have a little twist. When we have a cool microscopy picture or any other science-related picture, I try to write a little haiku, or sciku, accompanying the picture. Admittedly, even though you only need a few words, combining the restrictive rules with a scientific image makes up for quite a challenge. I have the idea to put that on the website but never came around to doing it.

Who has been your greatest source of encouragement and support throughout your scientific career?

When focusing on more senior people I have worked with, I would say Andy together with Chris, where did my PhD. They were fantastic mentors. Chris stood in the background but was fantastic in the lab. Andy stood out by introducing me to all his hotshot PI friends. He really paved the way for me by simply opening doors because of his network.

I also really appreciate the kind of mentorship that Kai gave through being very hands off in the background but really allowing me to grow and pushing me forward by supervising PhD students, having senior authorships and allowing me to present our lab’s work.

The biggest driver, though, should always come from yourself. If you are not encouraged and engaged enough by your own wish to have a scientific career, then you are never going to make it. You cannot do this for someone else.

Finally, it is wonderful to see young people explore science and flourish and find their own way. The best thing that can happen to you as a mentor is your PhD students starting to become experts who outperform you.

What advice would you offer to students or young researchers aspiring to enter the scientific field?

Payment is low and the workload can be extremely high, so you must love it. If you do not love this job and as many aspects as possible, do not even start. If you do like it that much, make sure you work on a topic that really fascinates you and work with techniques that you really like working with. Perhaps most importantly though, when you apply for a new position, make sure to taste the atmosphere and culture before committing. There is nothing more detrimental to one's scientific career and one’s happiness than working in a toxic environment.

Who, what, when, where & why?

Who?

- would you like to conduct research with if you had the chance?

Going back to the art of science it would be Ernst Haeckel. He made the most fantastic science art drawings by just drawing nature as he saw it, from tropical birds of paradise to microbes he saw through the microscope. If I had a chance to just sit next to him for one day drawing whatever he was looking at the time….I would love that.

What?

- do you like to do in your free time?

Spending time with my girlfriend and my kids. I also love nature and going for hikes in the mountains, running in the forest, or taking pictures, particularly of birds, butterflies, dragonflies or flowers. I like to play board games, watch some movies or series and go out for nice food at a fancy restaurant, preferably in the company of family or my closest friends.

When?

- do you find inspiration for your research?

I am most inspired when the younger people in the lab come to me with some fresh data and we try to find an explanation for an unexpected result. When you think out loud together, combining thoughts, making links to previous findings or things you may have heard at a conference or read in a paper. The moment you feel the excitement when you think you may be on to something. As my team members know, this is the moment I usually get carried away into the wildest, most far-fetched ideas, which two years of research later turn out to be true – though usually not.

Where?

- is your favorite travel destination?

Places where mountains and sea collide, with rough landscapes and unspoiled secluded bays or lakes. I prefer to go places away from the hordes of tourists so commonly found all over the globe. I have just returned from the Scottish Highlands and isles, which I have been returning to ever since I went there on my first holiday without my parents. It’s a pity that many beautiful spots are now swarmed with tourists but luckily most remain relatively close to the parking places and Harry Potter movie recording sites. By avoiding these you can still discover this beautiful place in peace and quiet, with the sea-wind blowing in your hair. Other recent destinations included the Faroe Islands, the Lofoten in northern Norway, and Iceland.

Why?

- did you choose your specific research topic(s)?

Coincidence in part. When I had just started studying, I was interested in how the brain works or how we evolved from a single cell organism all the way to the complex beings we are now. I had to choose biology or chemistry, and I liked both of them but at the time there was not a mix of the two, so in the end I chose chemistry because I was told I had a much better chance of getting a job later with chemistry than with biology.

When I was done with college, I wanted to do something much more biological and looked around for part-time research positions, as I wanted to spend the rest of my time playing my guitar. However, nobody wanted to hire me part-time as a technical assistant so in the end I decided I would go full in and do a PhD. I looked for topics that were advertised and one of them was on malaria. I thought that was interesting because it is an interesting disease but also, I could maybe help tackle a disease that is mainly a problem in poor countries which cannot afford expensive research. However, being a chemist by training I did not even know that malaria was a eukaryotic pathogen. As ignorant as I was, I thought it was just some bacteria or virus and knew it had something to do with mosquitoes. After I attended the Biology of Parasitism summer school, I got sold on the topic of single-cell parasites and decided to dedicate my career to these nasty yet beautiful and fascinating organisms. During the third of four two-week modules of the course, I worked with Geoff McFadden who discovered the apicoplast. He brought these parasites with red-fluorescent mitochondria and green-fluorescent apicoplast. We stained the DNA and looked at them. I did some FRAP (fluorescence recovery after photobleaching) experiments, and I just loved it. It earned me the nickname “Frapman”. I thought the way these organelles looked and how they intertwined was fascinating. Through my career, I never really focused on it, but they always seemed to pop back up at the most unexpected moments. When I started my own lab, I knew this had to be the topic to work on.

How?

- do you deal with setbacks?

It depends on whether there are smaller or bigger setbacks and whether they hit me personally. If I really feel personally set back, I drop everything I am working on, take the rest of the day off if my agenda permits and go home and walk a little bit through the forest or listen to some music, maybe even play some guitar, just get my mind off things. I want to let things go and enjoy and live in the moment. Then I go to bed early and run in the forest again in the morning and then I am totally reset. During this time, I try not to actively think about it and let things get processed slowly. Usually, somewhere along the way, thoughts and new ideas occur to me and by the time I am back in the lab, I have a plan.

In terms of the music I listen to when I am dealing with personal setbacks, it is very much dictated by the emotions I have in the moment. Thus, if it is primarily sadness or sorrow I experience, the music tends to be more melancholic, often minimal classical music, ambient, or (post) black metal. If I am feeling angry or upset, then the song needs to be something considerably faster and louder. And I can always listen to some of my favourite bands such Katatonia, Leprous, or Tool.

…or?

Attend a party or be the host?

Probably attend.

Museum or movie theatre?

I like both. Recently I visited a photography museum in Amsterdam, and they had an exhibition of pictures that were secretly taken in the final year of the Second World War in Nazi occupied Amsterdam. There was a whole movement of photographers who were going out to take pictures through the Hunger Winter. They used the photographs right after the Netherlands were liberated to make an exhibition to call for more aids because of the poor states of many people at the time. It was a very impressive exhibition including stunning pictures, especially when you know how they were taken, with the camera hidden under a cloak or in a bag.

Sneakers or dress shoes?

Definitely sneakers.

Optimist or pessimist?

This is a tricky one. I think most people will say optimist and probably think of me as one too, as I like to try to view things positively. But at the core I am a pessimist, definitely relative too many others. It does very much depend on what we are talking about and on my mood but if I think about what is happening in the world and what you hear on the news – all this human suffering, wars, a planet in crisis – it is easy to be pessimistic about where humanity is going. Fortunately, life is resilient and nature will survive long after we humans are gone.

Ambition or comfort?

Comfortably ambitious.

See the future or change the past?

Live in the present.

The interview was conducted by Nicole Kilian and has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Image sources: Taco Kooij.

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