Jan-Pieter Ploem

Hasselt University · Centre for Environmental Sciences (CMK)

In a polluted environment, metals are present as complex mixtures. As a result, organisms are exposed to different metals at the same time, which affects both metal-specific as well as overall toxicity. Detailed information about the molecular mechanisms underlying the adverse effects of combined exposures remains limited in terms of different life...

Pluripotent stem cells hold great potential for regenerative medicine. Increased replication and division, such is the case during regeneration, concomitantly increases the risk of adverse outcomes through the acquisition of mutations. Seeking for driving mechanisms of such outcomes, we challenged a pluripotent stem cell system during the tightly c...

Silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) belong to the most commercialized nanomaterials, used in both consumer products and medical applications. Despite its omnipresence, in-depth knowledge on the potential toxicity of nanosilver is still lacking, especially for developing organisms. Research on vertebrates is limited due to ethical concerns, and planarians...

Aiming to in vivo characterise the responses of pluripotent stem cells and regenerative tissues to carcinogenic stress, we employed the highly regenerative organism Schmidtea mediterranea. Its broad regenerative capacities are attributable to a large pool of pluripotent stem cells, which are considered key players in the lower vulnerability towards...

One of the major challenges in the development of alternative carcinogenicity assays is the prediction of non-genotoxic carcinogens. The variety of non-genotoxic cancer pathways complicates the search for reliable parameters expressing their carcinogenicity. As non-genotoxic and genotoxic carcinogens have different cancer risks, the objective of th...

Accurate and reliable carcinogenicity assays are imperative, as cancer risks are directly associated with the type and potency of a compound. A challenge for the development of alternative test methods is the prediction of non-genotoxic carcinogens, which entail different assessments of human cancer risk. The variety of non-genotoxic cancer pathway...