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.

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.

Between 2008 and 2012, I was a PhD student in the group of Yves van de Peer and guided by Klaas Vandepoele, doing research and software development in the fields of comparative and functional genomics. During this time, I developed the PLAZA platform (https://bioinformatics.psb.ugent.be/plaza). After obtaining my PhD in 2012, I joined the Applied Bioinformatics and Biostatistics (ABB) group, which provides support to the PSB Center in a variety of fields: from help with small scripts to large scale project analyzes. Meanwhile, I am still the main developer of the PLAZA platform, which is co-developed with the group of Klaas Vandepoele and ELIXIR Belgium.