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Geert De Jaeger is full professor in Plant Biotechnology at Ghent University and Group leader/Associate Science director at the VIB-UGent Center for Plant Systems Biology where he leads a research group on Functional Interactomics. 
De Jaeger’s technology driven research team obtained high visibility in the plant research field with their state of the art AP-MS platform that maps protein interaction networks in plants. He recently started the exploration of nutrient signaling in relation to plant growth, with the aim to contribute towards a more sustainable agriculture.

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.

Jonas De Backer graduated in 2019 as Master of Bioscience Engineering: Cell and Gene Biotechnology (Bio-engineer) at the faculty of Bioscience Engineering at Ghent University. During his master thesis under the guidance of Prof. Monica Höfte and Dr. Inge De Clercq at the Oxidative Stress Signaling group of Prof. Van Breusegem, he was involved in the study of the post-translational activation of transcription factors involved in retrograde signaling of plant stress responses. On the 1st of January 2020, he started his PhD in the EOS project Retrograde Arabidopsis Chlamydomonas Thiol signaling (ReACTs) to further study this topic while applying for an FWO predoctoral fellowship for fundamental research which he obtained that same year. Now he is doing his joint PhD entitled “Identification of proteases that activate membrane-bound transcription factors during mitochondrial retrograde regulation“ in the inter-organellar signaling lab of Prof. De Clercq in collaboration with the lab of Prof. Monica Höfte (Lab of Phytopathology, Ghent University) and the lab of Prof. Frank Van Breusegem (Lab of Oxidative Stress Signaling, PSB VIB-UGent).