Postdoctoral Fellow

I am working to understand the role of proteostasis machinery in JA signaling that regulate plant stress responses. Outside of work, I enjoy yoga, bouldering, reading and nature.

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

I did my Master thesis at the Functional Interactomics group in 2019-2020. During this year, I explored the approach of mining the TOR-SnRK1 nutrient signalling network towards higher yielding and stress resilient plants via  combinatorial CRISPR screens. Intrigued by the research and encouraged by the warm atmosphere in the group, I decided to apply for an FWO-SB mandate in order to continue this quest and contribute to a more sustainable and climate robust agricultural system. When I am not in the lab, I am always eager to jump on my bike for a trip, enjoying nature and being inspired and ready for new challenges!

My bioresume

I have obtained my Master in Biology-Plant Biotechnology at Ghent University (1992) and my PhD under the supervision of Geert Angenon and Marc Van Montagu at the Laboratory of Genetics, Ghent University (Belgium, 1998), studying plant seed storage protein synthesis. During my PhD, I have also been a visiting researcher at CIAT in Cali (Colombia) in the group of Cesar Cardona. After obtaining my PhD degree, I moved to the lab of Ramon Serrano at the IBMCP-UPV in Valencia (Spain) as a Marie Curie EU postdoctoral fellow to work for 2 years on yeast salt tolerance. I returned to Belgium afterwards and started my own research group within the VIB-UGent Center for Plant Systems Biology in 2003, focusing on phytohormone signaling, gene discovery in plant specialized metabolism and metabolic engineering. My current research aspires to understand jasmonate signaling in model, crop and medicinal plants and unravel the mechanisms that steer plant metabolism in fitness programs to find novel tools for plant metabolic engineering and synthetic biology. I have been appointed as a Full Professor at Ghent University in 2015 and senior Full Professor in 2022. I have been mentoring over 45 master students, 35 PhD students and 25 postdoctoral researchers. Over 10 of my alumni have acquired leading academic positions as group leaders, professors or managers of core facilities at universities in Belgium and abroad. Since 2015 I have been included in the Thomson Reuters list of ISI Highly Cited Researchers in Plant & Animal Sciences. In 2020 I have been elected as an EMBO member.