Liu Hongyan

Liu Hongyan - Predoctoral fellow
Joined the group in 2022

Hongyan achieved a master degree in botany in 2022. Afterwards, she started her PhD project at PSB in October, in the Functional Phosphoproteomics group, where she is guided by Ive De Smet. Currently, she focused on the roles of ABA in high temperature adaptation in Arabidopsis. At this stage, she has mainly explored the cooperative function of kinase, phosphatase and transcription factors.

De Smet Ive

De Smet Ive - Group leader
Joined the group in 2013

I am leading the Functional Phosphoproteomics group at VIB since 2013. My long-term goal as a researcher is to explain how plants develop and adapt to environmental changes. I am interested in conserved cellular phosphorylation-driven signaling mechanisms orchestrating warm temperature-mediated growth responses in plants. In the future, I will go beyond cataloguing dynamic changes in phosphorylation, and explore the functional role of conserved phosphorylation events and start visualizing signaling networks for which we will validate the connection between kinases/phosphatases and their substrates.
 
During my PhD at VIB-UGent with Tom Beeckman (2001 – 2006) [including research visits to University of Leeds (UK) and Duke University (USA)], I contributed to our understanding of lateral root organogenesis. From 2006 – 2010, I joined the lab of Gerd Jürgens (Germany) as a postdoctoral research fellow funded by EMBO and Marie Curie Fellowships, focusing on early embryogenesis and auxin signaling. From 2011 – 2015, I established my first research group at the University of Nottingham (UK), funded by a prestigious BBSRC David Phillips Research Fellowship and focusing on small peptide and receptor kinase signaling in plant development. In 2013, I returned to VIB (Belgium) and established my second research group. Since then, I started to explore phosphorylation-mediated signaling during abiotic stress, using an up-to-date workflow to capture protein phosphorylation proteome-wide. In 2014, I became a UGent professor. Finally, I recently developed a completely new research program, focusing on temperature signaling.
 

Stomatal movement

Stomata

Plants have developed various cellular, physiological and morphological solutions to deal with changing environmental conditions. To tightly control gas and water vapor exchange between the plant body and the environment, pores bordered by two guard cells on the epidermis of aboveground plant organs, called stomata, fine-tune the exchange rate by well-regulated stomatal opening and closing to facilitate physiological processes such as photosynthesis and transpiration. 

Science Communication

Ive and David

 #ArtGenetics

Our fruits, vegetables, and cereal crops stem from a wild ancestor and have undergone major changes through millennia of domestication and selection. There are various ways to reveal plant diversity over time, and one of these is through the combination of art history and genetics (also known as #ArtGenetics).

Phosphoproteomics

Spectrum

We apply a gel-free phosphoproteomics pipeline to different biological systems: wheat and soybean organs, Arabidopsis cell suspension cultures, and Arabidopsis seedlings. We combine these systems with loss- and gain-of-function approaches (such as tightly controlled systems using a constitutively active form under a native, inducible promoter), engineered kinases, and specific stimuli to perform an untargeted mass spectrometric analysis of the phosphoproteome.

Phosphorylation-mediated signalling networks

Kinases and Phosphatases

While the knowledge on post-translational regulation through transient phosphorylation in plants is growing because of its crucial importance in plant molecular networks, it remains an underexplored and challenging area.
In Arabidopsis and major crop species, phosphorylation is controlled by a large number of protein kinases and phosphatase complexes. However, for the majority of cytoplasmic kinases, membrane-associated receptor kinases and phosphatases unravelling physiological and developmental roles and identifying substrates remain a challenge.

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