She accomplished her master study in 2017, which is followed by the PhD study with the CSC scholarship in the Functional Phosphoproteomics group at VIB in October 2017. She is working on the high temperature-mediated signaling events in Arabidopsis and crops (wheat, soybean). In Arabidopsis, She is mainly exploring how warm temperature prioritizes growth over jasmonate-mediated responses. Additionally, She is also interested in warm temperature-regulated early signaling events and the correlated networks using phosphoproteomics. In wheat, she applies phosphoproteomics to explore how high temperature affects the reproductive growth and development, followed by functional validation under high temperature.
 

Trang Tran successfully completed his doctoral program fully-funded by VLIR-UOS at Ghent University in 2021, focusing on investigating the modes of action of Streptomyces strains against fungal phytopathogens and mitigating mycotoxin contamination of maize grains through good agricultural practices (GAPs). Subsequently, he served as a postdoctoral researcher at INRAE in France, where his research aimed to unravel the antifungal and antimycotoxin mechanisms of stilbenoids against Fusarium Head Blight, utilizing multi-omics approaches. Trang Tran then held the position of an FWO postdoctoral researcher at UGent and KULeuven. In this role, he was dedicated to exploring fructan metabolizing microbes and developing sweet immunity-mediated synthetic microbial communities (SWEETiCOM). The combination of fructans as prebiotics and SWEETiCOM has the potential to promote plant growth and enhance plant tolerance to both biotic and abiotic stresses. Currently, he is a postdoctoral fellow at VIB-UGent center for Plant Systems Biology. His role is to discover novel bioactive metabolites via exploiting the chemical warfare during tomato-fungi interactions. He aims to establish an innovative plant-based platform to awaken the vast majority of cryptic biosynthesis gene clusters in fungi, thereby discovering and producing previously unknown fungal bioactive metabolites with potent applications for agriculture and human health. Interests: • Microbe-plant interaction • Biostimulant - Priming - Biocontrol • Transcriptomics • Metabolomics • Phenomics