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.

Short CV

Klaas Vandepoele is Full Professor at Ghent University and group leader in the VIB-UGent Center for Plant Systems Biology. His aim is to extract biological knowledge from large-scale experimental data sets using data integration, comparative sequence/chromatin/expression analysis, and network biology. Through the development and application of various bioinformatics methods, he identifies new aspects of genome biology, especially in the area of gene function prediction, gene regulation and evolutionary/systems biology in plants, green algae, and diatoms. Klaas Vandepoele published >160 papers in international peer-reviewed scientific journals and is a Highly Cited Researcher.

Intrigued by the rapid technological advances is biotechnology, I started my PhD in 2003 mainly focusing on the development of methods to study molecular interactions in plants. My initial interest was to transfer and optimize tandem affinity purification coupled to mass spectrometry to study protein complexes in plants. During my PhD and post-doc, I continuously challenged myself to further improve and fine-tune these methods, enabling investigation of not only stable but also more transient and weak protein interactions from a diverse set of plant tissues/species. This finally led to the development of a streamlined technology platform, which formed the base of the current Plant Interactomics Facility at PSB, delivering internal and external AP-MS service for academia and industry.
In parallel I also invested quite some time in the development of methods to study interactions between proteins and DNA in situ, giving rise to the TChAP-seq technology in cell suspension cultures that provides deep coverage in the mapping of gene regulatory networks. As a complementary approach, I have been exploring methods to study protein-DNA interactions from a gene-centered view, identifying proteins bound to a genomic region of interest.
From a biological perspective, I initially applied these methods to obtain more insight into how plant cells proliferate, studying protein complexes that involve core cell cycle regulators. This allowed me to map a comprehensive cell cycle interactome in plants. In recent years, I switched my interest trying to understand how plants sense energy and nutrients and translate this information into adequate growth responses. Hereto, I am investigating the dynamic signaling networks around the TOR and SnRK1 kinases, integrating interactomics with phosphoproteomics.

Frank Van Breusegem obtained his Bachelor and Master degree at Ghent University. He is a group leader of the Oxidative Stress Signaling group at the VIB Center for Plant Systems Biology (since 2001); full professor at Ghent University and he recently was elected vice-chair of the Department of Plant Biotechnology and Bioinformatics (Faculty of Sciences, Ghent University). Since his early studies under the supervision of em. Prof. Marc Van Montagu, he focuses on the molecular impact of oxidative stress on plant cells. He obtained his PhD from Ghent University (1997) with work on “Engineering Stress Tolerance in Maize”. Nowadays, the primary objective of the Van Breusegem lab is the identification and functional analysis of regulatory gene and protein networks involved in the oxidative stress response in plants. Ultimately, he aims to translate this knowledge into biotechnological crop efficiency concepts. The lab has played a pioneering role in determining H₂O₂-dependent molecular and physiological responses in plants. The Van Breusegem lab is internationally recognized mainly because of its successful multi-omics driven approaches that allowed to identify several key targets in the oxidative stress response. Frank Van Breusegem has published more than 150 peer-reviewed publications (Clarivate h-index=59), is a frequent invited speaker and is monitoring editor of the leading plant journal “Plant Physiology”.

Expertise: ROS metabolism and oxidative stress signalling

Amna Mhamdi obtained her Master's degree in Plant Physiology and Biotechnology from Tunis El Manar University (Tunisia) in 2006. In 2007, she started her PhD in the group of Graham Noctor at the Université de Paris Sud (France), studying the role of enzymes involved in glutathione and NADPH reduction in oxidative stress signalling. After obtaining her PhD in 2010, she stayed in the same laboratory and continued as a postdoctoral researcher. From 2016, she joined the oxidative stress signalling group led by Frank Van Breusegem at PSB (Belgium) to study the photorespiratory hydrogen peroxide signalling mechanisms and cysteine oxidation events that occur during plant responses to stress. Since 2023, Amna has been working as a Staff Scientist at VIB-Belgium, Frank Van Breusegem group, with a special focus on understanding the role of redox regulation of transcription complexes and translating key findings observed in Arabidopsis to crop plants. To address research questions in the field of redox and oxidative signalling, Amna is using an integrative approach involving genetics and transcriptomic, proteomic as well as metabolomic profiling.