Maite Saura Sanchez

Maite earned her Bachelor’s degree in Biotechnology and her Master’s Degree in Plant Molecular and Cellular Biotechnology from the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV). Following this, she relocated to Argentina to start her PhD at IFEVA (Buenos Aires), where she studied the role of BBX proteins in the shade avoidance responses in Arabidopsis thaliana. During this period, she also completed a Master’s degree in Bioinformatics and Biostatistics at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC). In 2021, she joined Bert De Rybel's group to participate in a collaborative project with Tom Beeckman (PSB-VIB) and Tina Kyndt (UGent). Her current project aims to study the conserved mechanisms between dicots and monocots during de novo organogenesis processes in roots at the single-cell level.

Between 2008 and 2012, I was a PhD student in the group of Yves van de Peer and guided by Klaas Vandepoele, doing research and software development in the fields of comparative and functional genomics. During this time, I developed the PLAZA platform (https://bioinformatics.psb.ugent.be/plaza). After obtaining my PhD in 2012, I joined the Applied Bioinformatics and Biostatistics (ABB) group, which provides support to the PSB Center in a variety of fields: from help with small scripts to large scale project analyzes. Meanwhile, I am still the main developer of the PLAZA platform, which is co-developed with the group of Klaas Vandepoele and ELIXIR Belgium.
 

Jingjing Huang obtained the master degree in Molecular biology and Biochemistry from Nanjing Agricultural University (China) in 2009. In 2010, She Joined the Delledonne lab in the University of Verona (Italy) to study the origins of nitric oxide in plants and mechanism that how plants perceive and transduce the nitric oxide signal in cellular pathways. She obtained the PhD degree in Biotechnology in 2014. From June 2014 till October 2016, she worked in the Messens lab in VIB-VUB center for Structural Biology, mainly focused on focued on in vitro biochemical study on the S-sulfenylated plant proteins. Since November 2016, she continued her research work on Cys OxiPTM to work in the Van Breusegem in VIB-UGent center for Plant System Biology. From September to December in 2018, Jingjing has worked in Claire Remacle lab in the University of Liege on project "Organellar Redox Signaling in Plants". Since October 2019, Jingjing works as a senior FWO postdoctoral fellow in the Van Breusegem lab focusing on Cysteine oxidations in plants.

Post-doctoral fellow

Judith is a postdoctoral scientist in the group of Prof. Sofie Goormachtig at VIB-UGent Center for Plant Systems Biology (FWO fellowships) since 2019. She obtained her PhD in 2016 in the group of Prof. Dirk Inze, where she focused on the regulation of Arabidopsis leaf growth by sugars. After her PhD, she joined the group of Dr. Vanessa Wahl at the Department of Prof. Mark Stitt in the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology (Potsdam, Germany), where she studied the effect of limited nitrogen availability on flowering and tuberization in Arabidopsis and potato. In her current research, she uses this expertise to investigate plant-microbe symbiotic interactions in different plant crops. Her main focus is unraveling the role of sugar signaling during soybean and pea nodulation.

Wei Xiao earned his PhD at ZMBP, University of Tuebingen, Germany, in 2022, supervised by Prof. Laura Ragni. Following that, he completed a one-year postdoctoral position at ZMBP, University of Tuebingen, Germany, supervised by Prof. Laura Ragni. In 2023, he is working as a Postdoctoral fellow in the group of vascular development, explicitly focusing on the vascular redevelopment in Selaginella moellendorffii.

Inter-organelle Stress Signalling

To be able to survive constantly changing and often harmful environmental conditions, plants must continuously adapt. Therefore, plants have complex mechanisms that sense and transduce environmental stimuli into adaptive and defence responses. Organelles within the cell are thought to be important sensors of such stresses, such as water limitation or pathogen attack. They communicate their stressed status with the nucleus to activate tolerance mechanisms and defence responses against the incoming stresses. We have previously revealed a novel mechanism of how mitochondria, chloroplasts, and the endoplasmic reticulum communicate stress signals to coordinate stress signal transduction into adaptive responses in the nucleus. However, we still lack a profound mechanistic understanding of how organelles cooperate with each other during stress responses. The signalling sources within the organelles, their release and/or propagation, and their perception by other organelles and eventually by the nucleus are still enigmatic. Therefore, the Inter-organelle Stress Signalling team performs studies to understand the complex organelle-organelle and organelle-to-nucleus cross-talk using high-end multi-omics and cell biology approaches.

My career path

In addition of being a VIB group leader I am also holding a full professor position in the Faculty of Science at Ghent University. Next to my VIB and university research mandates I am teaching courses in the Master of Science in Bioinformatics and the Master of Science Biochemistry and Biotechnology.
I grew up in the German Palatinate region and studied Biology in Marburg, Germany, and gained first research experience during a study project in tropical northeastern Australia. Funded by the International Max Planck Research School (IMPRS) I then joined the research group of Arp Schnittger and Martin Hülskamp at the Max-Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research and the University of Cologne. In 2007, I graduated with a PhD in Botany on the topic of cell cycle regulation during the vegetative and reproductive development of plants.
I continued to work on this topic for another two years before deciding to change research fields. Supported by an EMBO long-term fellowship, I joined the VIB Center for Plant Systems Biology in Ghent in 2009 to study the molecular regulation of programmed cell death (PCD) in the context of plant development.
After becoming a Junior VIB Group leader, I additionally obtained a part-time assistant professorship at Ghent University in 2013, followed by a full-time assistant professorship in 2015, an associate professorship in 2018, and a full professorship in 2020. 
My team takes a systems biology approach considering PCD and its underlying mechanisms in plants as a fundamental developmental principle to solve. Developmental PCD processes occur throughout the life cycle of plants, and many of them are essential for plant development and reproduction. Despite this undebated relevance, our knowledge of how PCD is controlled on the molecular genetics level is still very limited.
Starting an independent research line on developmental PCD was and still is pioneering work. In the first years my team was busy with exploring PCD concepts and possible PCD model systems. We had to establish basic genetics, molecular, and cell biological tools to visualize, detect, and dissect PCD processes in plants. By now we are focusing on different fundamental and applied PCD model systems, including the Arabidopsis root cap, the Arabidopsis and maize endosperm, the poppy self-incompatibility response, and senescence processes in Arabidopsis and maize flowers. With this comparative approach we aim to identify conserved core elements of the developmental cell death program as well as its tissue-specific adaptations.
While research on developmental PCD in plants is still essentially fundamental in nature, we strive to discover mechanisms that are of relevance to applied questions of plant biology, for example in forestry and agriculture. Given the importance of developmental PCD and the scarcity of available information on this process, PCD research offers a considerable untapped potential to contribute to bracing our crops in the light of the ongoing climate crisis.