Naomi obtained her master’s degree in Biochemistry and Biotechnology from Ghent University in 2020. For her master’s thesis she performed an Erasmus exchange to the Sainsbury lab of Cambridge University (SLCU), where she worked on the role MtLSH1 and MtNOOT1/2 during early nodule organogenesis in Medicago truncatula within the group of Prof. Dr. Giles Oldroyd. Currently, Naomi is performing her PhD research (FWO-SB fellowship) at the Rhizosphere group of Prof. Dr. Sofie Goormachtig, this time shifting her focus to another symbiont: arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF). During her PhD, Naomi uses diverse single cell and -nuclei transcriptomics and proteomics approaches to obtain a better understanding of the immunity-related crosstalk occurring during the tomato-AMF symbiotic interaction.

Afroditi obtained her Master’s degree in Advanced Experimental and Computational Biosciences at the University of Thessaly, Greece, in 2022, where she worked on plant-fungal transkingdom RNAi. During her studies she participated at the iGEM competition, a worldwide synthetic biology competition, as a team member in 2019, a team advisor at 2021 and a team instructor at 2022. In 2022, she moved to Belgium and joined the research group of Prof. Dr. Sofie Goormachtig and started a PhD (FWO fellowship) under the supervision of Dr. Sylwia Struk, at the VIB-UGent Center for Plant Systems Biology. Her research focuses on the interaction of nitrogen-fixing rhizobia and Soybean, and the regulation of the nodulation process. More specifically, her project concentrates on the final steps of the Autoregulation of Nodulation (AON) pathway and the Too Much Love (TML) genes of Soybean, and how they control nodulation.

Predoctoral fellow

Emma obtained her Master’s degree in Biochemistry-Biotechnology at Ghent University in 2022. For her Master thesis, she did an Erasmus exchange to Bremen University (Germany), where she worked on the interaction between rice and the endophyte Azoarcus olearius. After her studies, she started a PhD (FWO fellowship) in the research group of Prof. Dr. Sofie Goormachtig, under supervision of Dr. Sylwia Struk, at the VIB-UGent Center for Plant Systems Biology. Her PhD research concerns the interaction between soybean and nitrogen-fixing rhizobia, a symbiotic interaction which is called nodulation. In particular, she focuses on the regulation of nodulation and the receptor kinase NARK in this signalling pathway.

Marjon obtained her Master's degree in Biology at Ghent University in 2021. For her master thesis she worked in the lab of Sofie Goormachtig on the molecular pathways involved in the plant growth promoting effect of Caulobacter RHG1 on Arabidopsis thaliana. After her studies she started as assistant in the Rhizosphere group, conducting her PhD research under supervision of Dr. Sylwia Struk. Her research focusses on elucidating which proteins are involved in the autoregulation of nodulation pathway in Medicago truncatula.

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.