Vascular Development

Claudia von der Mark

With a strong background in root physiology and vascular development, Claudia joined the group of prof. Bert De Rybel in September 2022 to explore the transcriptional landscape and central regulators of xylem formation. During her undergraduate and graduate studies, which she conducted at the Heinrich Heine University in Dusseldorf (Germany), she worked on deciphering the plant’s iron deficiency response under the lead of Prof. Petra Bauer. In March 2018 she moved to Switzerland to conduct her doctoral research at the ETH Zurich. Together with her supervisor Prof. Antia Rodriguez-Villalon and colleagues she investigated the role of signaling phospholipids during vascular development. Claudia was a scholarship holder of the Walter Benjamin stipend (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) and is currently supported by the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) in form of a junior postdoctoral fellowship.

Eline graduated from the Faculty of Sciences at Ghent University in 2021 with a Master in Biology, after which she continued her studies with a one-year Advanced Master in Plant Biotechnology. She performed her second Master thesis in the Vascular Development lab, where she subsequently joined to start a PhD in November 2022. Her project is embedded within the “PIPELINES” ERC Consolidator Grant (EU-funding) which was acquired by Bert De Rybel, and aims to discover novel transcriptional regulators in the process of vascular development through the use of single cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) data. By studying the scRNA-seq data of evolutionary diverged model species that contain a vascular system, she aims to find regulators in xylem and phloem which are evolutionary conserved.

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.

Originally from Kyiv, Ukraine, Nataliia has completed her Bachelor and Master studies at Queen Mary University and Imperial University London, respectively, with a focus on plant molecular and synthetic biology. For her PhD, she has moved to the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, Austria to the group of Professor Luschnig to decipher the mechanisms controlling protein polarity in the root. Driven by the interest of understanding mechanisms guiding polarity, currently Nataliia is focused on studying the process of oriented cell divisions in Professor De Rybel's group.

In 2019, I obtained a Master in Biology at Ghent University. Since then, I have been working on the relationship between the TOR/SnRK1 regulatory hub and nitrogen signaling.

The tissue specific responses of roots to cytokinin

Max used single-cell RNA-sequencing to examine the tissue-specific responses of the Arabidopsis thaliana root to cytokinin application. He aimed to leverage the single-cell data to identify and characterize novel tissue-specific enactors of cytokinin function in the root vascular tissues, and identify tissue-specific DNA binding motifs associated with up- or downregulation of gene expression downstream of cytokinin signalling.