RESEARCH FOCUS
Endocytosis controls cellular perception of the outside world but how this is regulated in plants remains largely unknown. Gaining mechanistic insight into endocytosis in plants is an essential step towards being able to modulate signalling pathways, to use trafficking to increase plant resilience and to understand the causality of the evolutionary differences in trafficking between eukaryotes.
The overall objective of the research in the group is to gain a deep mechanistic insight into the developmentally essential process of clathrin-mediated endocytosis (CME) in plants. CME, being a catabolic process, is also linked to autophagy, yet how both processes are intertwined remains largely unknown. In the Van Damme lab, we are addressing the following questions:
- How is CME organized at the structural level?
- What are the players, how are they recruited to their cargo and how is CME executed?
- What are the regulatory modules of CME and how do these respond to abiotic stress?
- How are endocytosis and autophagy-dependent degradation connected?
To answer these questions, we continuously adapt our toolbox and combine state-of-the art interactomics with highly dynamic multi-color live cell imaging and structural biology approaches.
Next to the fundamental research topics above, we also use our gained knowledge on endocytosis, autophagy and imaging in more applied projects. Currently, we are investigating the role of autophagy in microspore embryogenesis in Brassica napus and we are using live cell imaging to visualize plant biotic interactions.
