Cover

The three circles can be seen as mountain peaks in a flat landscape with white isolines describing their height. However, these are no ordinary mountains. The height of peaks in an evolutionary landscape corresponds with the fitness or a particular biological function. Joost van Ingen, a friend of PhD student Marjon de Vos, came up with the design after a joint brainstorm. It isn’t easy to illustrate the bacterial evolutionary processes that De Vos has studied. She manipulated the environments, carefully mapped the various mutations and measured the bacteria’s fitness, as each was a new attempt in climbing the evolutionary mountain. Inspired by the Joy Division music that they had listened to, and the wiggly lines on the album’s cover, Van Ingen decided to make Fourier transforms of the music (and two other songs), and plot these in circles. Thus arose the three musical peaks that now adorn De Vos’ cover. De Vos worked at the AMOLF biophysics laboratory, which is led by her PhD supervisor Sander Tans, a professor at the faculty of Applied Sciences’ bionanoscience group.

Empirical adaptive landscapes in variable environments, 31 January 2012, PhD supervisor Professor Sander Tans (Applied Sciences).