Dr Jocelyne Vreede of the Computational Chemistry group at the Van ‘t Hoff Institute for Molecular Sciences has recently been awarded funding as part of the Marie Curie doctoral network MeChaNiSM. This will enable her to appoint two PhD students who will work on molecular simulation methods for nucleic acids (DNA and RNA). The aim is to better understand how nucleic acids interact with other molecules such as therapeutics, and study the effect of modified fluorescent nucleotides on the shape of DNA and RNA.