Rhizosphere

Michiel Vandecasteele obtained his PhD in Bioscience Engineering at Ghent University in 2019. During his PhD, he studied the occurrence, genotypic diversity, and the mode of action of pathogenic Alternaria species on Flemish potato fields, while also performing educational tasks as an assistant. In 2020, he returned to the Rhizosphere group as a doctor-assistant since he performed his Master’s thesis in the same group eight years prior. Now, he investigates the action of drought-tolerance-inducing rhizobacteria on wheat 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 Junior fellowship). She obtained her PhD in 2016 in the group of Prof. Dirk Inzé, where she focused on the regulation of Arabidopsis leaf growth by sugars. After her PhD, she joined Dr. Mark Stitt’s Department 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 species. Her main focus is unraveling the role of arbuscular mycorrhiza fungal proteins during symbiosis in tomato.
 

My career path

I am full professor at Ghent University and group leader at the VIB center of Plant Systems Biology in Belgium. I combine research and education because I think they cannot be separated and they strengthen each other. Hence, apart from my scientific activities, I am intensively involved in education and educational organization. 

My research career started in 1987 at the UGent focusing on how interactions between plant roots and neighboring organisms influence plant growth in a positive way.
Initially, the emphasis was on the symbiosis between legumes and rhizobia, resulting in the formation of new root organs, the nodules, in which the rhizobia reside and fix atmospheric nitrogen for the plant.  At that time, we studied the non-model symbiosis between the tropical legume Sesbania rostrata and the bacterium Azorhizobium caulinodans and could unravel the early signaling events and specific adaptations that have evolved to enable this peculiar nodulation upon water submergence. During my post-doc and early group leader career, we studied long-distance control of nodule organogenesis in the model legume Medicago truncatula and made significant contributions to understand how the nodule number is controlled.
During my early career, I went three times abroad for a prolonged period at the Laboratoire de Biologie des Sols, ORSTOM (Dakar, Sénégal) (Prof. Dreyfus), at the MSU-DOE, Plant Research Laboratory, Michigan State University (East Lansing, MI, USA) (Prof. De Bruijn) and at the ETH-Zürich, Institute of Plant Sciences (Prof. Potrykus), providing me both international connections and abroad research experience.

In 2005, I became professor at the Ghent University in the currently named Department of Plant Biotechnology and Bioinformatics. This department is also embedded in the VIB Center of Plant Systems Biology of the VIB. Since 2010, I am appointed full-time principal investigator of the Rhizosphere group at VIB. In my group, we still study the molecular communication between roots and rhizosphere microorganisms but the studies go beyond the rhizobia legume interaction as you can read from our web page. In 2017, I became full professor.

I find it very important that our basic research has valuable economic and societal relevance. Together with VIB colleagues, I am  very proud to have established the start-up Aphea.Bio (www.aphea.bio, 2017) focusing on the use of plant growth promoting rhizobacteria in agriculture. Recently, together with ILVO, I contributed to the start-up Protealis (https://www.protealis.com) aiming at the production of sustainable plant protein for Europe.