Stijn Dhondt

Stijn Dhondt
Ghent University | UGhent · VIB Department of Plant Systems Biology

PhD

About

63
Publications
18,338
Reads
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4,737
Citations
Additional affiliations
October 2012 - present
Ghent University
Position
  • PostDoc Position

Publications

Publications (63)
Preprint
As agricultural production is reaching its limits regarding outputs and land use, the need to further improve crop yield is greater than ever. The limited translatability from in vitro lab results into more natural growth conditions in soil remains problematic. Although considerable progress has been made in developing soil-growth assays to tackle...
Article
Hyperspectral Imaging (HSI) is one of the emerging techniques used in plant phenotyping as it carries abundant information and is non-invasive to plants. However, factors like illumination effect and high-dimensional spectral features need to be solved to attain higher accuracy of plant trait analysis. This research explored and analysed spectral n...
Article
Full-text available
As agricultural production is reaching its limits regarding outputs and land use, the need to further improve crop yield is greater than ever. The limited translatability from in vitro lab results into more natural growth conditions in soil remains problematic. Although considerable progress has been made in developing soil‐growth assays to tackle...
Chapter
Full-text available
The optical signature of a plant is an essential tool in predicting vegetation water content for quantitative assessment of plant status under drought stress. Plant responses to water stress may involve optically-complex reactions, thus a more sophisticated learning algorithm is needed for accurate prediction. This study proposes Kernel Ridge Regre...
Article
Drought at flowering and grain filling greatly reduces maize (Zea mays) yield. Climate change is causing earlier and longer lasting periods of drought, which affect the growth of multiple maize organs throughout development. To study how long periods of water deficit impact the dynamic nature of growth, and to determine how these relate to reproduc...
Article
Full-text available
Optimal plant growth performance requires that the presence and action of growth signals, such as gibberellins (GAs), are coordinated with the availability of photo-assimilates. Here, we studied the links between GA biosynthesis and carbon availability, and the subsequent effects on growth. We established that carbon availability, light and dark cu...
Preprint
Full-text available
Optimal plant growth performance requires that the action of growth signals, such as gibberellins (GA), are coordinated with the availability of photo-assimilates. Here, we studied the links between gibberellin biosynthesis and carbon availability, and the subsequent effects on growth. The results presented here show that carbon availability, light...
Article
Full-text available
Agrochemicals provide vast potential to improve plant productivity, because they are easy to implement at low cost while not being restricted by species barriers as compared to breeding strategies. Despite the general interest, only few compounds with growth-promoting activity have been described so far. Here, we add cis-cinnamic acid (c-CA) to the...
Article
The study of physiological processes resulting from water-limited conditions in crops is essential for the selection of drought-tolerant genotypes and the functional analysis of related genes. A promising, non-invasive technique for plant trait analysis is close-range hyperspectral imaging (HSI), which has great potential for the early detection of...
Article
Full-text available
HISTONE MONOUBIQUITINATION1 (HUB1) and its paralog HUB2 act in a conserved heterotetrameric complex in the chromatin-mediated transcriptional modulation of developmental programs, such as flowering time, dormancy, and the circadian clock. The KHD1 and SPEN3 proteins were identified as interactors of the HUB1 and HUB2 proteins with in vitro RNA-bind...
Article
Full-text available
Droughts cause severe crop losses worldwide and climate change is projected to increase their prevalence in the future. Similar to the situation for many crops, the reference plant Arabidopsis thaliana (Ath) is considered drought‐sensitive, whereas, as we demonstrate, its close relatives Arabidopsis lyrata (Aly) and Eutrema salsugineum (Esa) are dr...
Article
Phytohormone cytokinin has been shown to affect many aspects of plant development ranging from the regulation of the shoot apical meristem to leaf senescence. However some studies reported contradictory effects of cytokinin on leaf physiology. Thus, cytokinin treatments cause both chlorosis and increased greening, and both decrease and increase in...
Article
Full-text available
Key message Here, we used a hxk1 mutant in the Col-0 background. We demonstrated that HXK1 regulates cell proliferation and expansion early during leaf development, and that HXK1 is involved in sucrose-induced leaf growth stimulation independent of GPT2. Furthermore, we identified KINγ as a novel HXK1-interacting protein. Abstract In the last deca...
Article
Full-text available
The conserved poly(ADP-ribosyl)ation (PAR) pathway consists of three genetic components that are potential targets to modulate the plant’s energy homeostasis upon stress with the aim to improve yield stability in crops and help secure food supply. We studied the role of the PAR pathway component ADP-ribose/NADH pyrophosphohydrolase (AtNUDX7) in yie...
Article
Full-text available
The potential of close-range hyperspectral imaging (HSI) as a tool for detecting early drought stress responses in plants grown in a high-throughput plant phenotyping platform (HTPPP) was explored. Reflectance spectra from leaves in close-range imaging are highly influenced by plant geometry and its specific alignment towards the imaging system. Th...
Article
Full-text available
Plant phenotyping has emerged as a comprehensive field of research as the result of significant advancements in the application of imaging sensors for high-throughput data collection. The flip side is the risk of drowning in the massive amounts of data generated by automated phenotyping systems. Currently, the major challenge lies in data managemen...
Article
Full-text available
Most living organisms developed systems to efficiently time environmental changes. The plant-clock acts in coordination with external signals to generate output responses determining seasonal growth and flowering time. Here, we show that two Arabidopsis thaliana transcription factors, FAR1 RELATED SEQUENCE 7 (FRS7) and FRS12, act as negative regula...
Data
Detailed description of the FRS12-HBH bound genomic regions obtained by TChAP-Seq.
Data
GO-enrichment analysis of the significantly expressed genes in the Pro35S:FRS12-GR-1 line.
Data
Protein identification details of the FRS12 (bait) interactors obtained by TAP and identified by MS with the LTQ Orbitrap.
Data
Differentially expressed genes obtained by RNA-Sequencing analysis of the Pro35S:FRS12-GR-1 line.
Data
List of genes reproductively bound by FRS12-HBH at ZT20.
Article
Strobilurins are an important class of agrochemical fungicides used throughout the world on a wide variety of crops as protection against fungal pathogens. In addition to this protective role, they are reported to also positively influence plant physiology. In this study, we analyzed the effect of Stroby® WG, a commercially available fungicide cons...
Article
Full-text available
Although phytohormones such as gibberellins are essential for many conserved aspects of plant physiology and development, plants vary greatly in their responses to these regulatory compounds. Here, we use genetic perturbation of endogenous gibberellin levels to probe the extent of intraspecific variation in gibberellin responses in natural accessio...
Presentation
Full-text available
Plant phenotyping is the act of determining quantitative and qualitative functional plant traits. It includes monitoring the interaction of a plant of particular genetic characteristics with its environment. This interaction influences structural phenotypic traits, such as plant height, and plant functional traits, such as photosynthetic activity....
Article
Full-text available
Plant growth and crop yield are negatively affected by a reduction in water availability. However, a clear understanding of how growth is regulated under non-lethal drought conditions is lacking. Recent advances in genomics, phenomics and transcriptomics allow in-depth analysis of natural variation. In this study, we conducted a detailed screening...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
While Hyperspectral Imaging (HSI) has been successfully applied for remote monitoring of vegetation, its use is still underdeveloped in close range settings, where a higher spatial and temporal resolution is applied to measure functional plant traits. Much more than remotely, leaf reflectance spectra in close range are very sensitive to plant geome...
Article
Leaves are the plant's powerhouses, providing energy for all organs through sugar production during photosynthesis. However, sugars do not only serve as metabolic energy source for sink tissues, but also as signaling molecules, affecting gene expression through conserved signaling pathways to regulate plant growth and development. Here, we describe...
Conference Paper
This work proposes a new image fusion method that is well suited for merging angle information and extending the field of depth of Differential Interference Contrast (DIC) microscopic images. Many other extend field of depth methods only regularize their solution in a small neighborhood. Such approaches are not suitable for DIC images where reliabl...
Article
As the regulatory networks of growth at the cellular level are elucidated at a fast pace, their complexity is not reduced; on the contrary, the tissue, organ and even whole-plant level affect cell proliferation and expansion by means of development-induced and environment-induced signaling events in growth regulatory processes. Measurement of growt...
Article
Full-text available
Although the response of plants exposed to severe drought stress has been studied extensively, little is known about how plants adapt their growth under mild drought stress conditions. Here, we analyzed the leaf and rosette growth response of six Arabidopsis thaliana accessions originating from different geographic regions, when exposed to mild dro...
Article
Although the quantitative characterization of growth phenotypes is of key importance for the understanding of essential networks driving plant growth, the majority of growth-related genes is still being identified based on qualitative visual observations and/or single endpoint quantitative measurements. We developed an IGIS, an In vitro Growth Imag...
Article
Full-text available
The transcriptional coactivator ANGUSTIFOLIA3 (AN3) stimulates cell proliferation during Arabidopsis thaliana leaf development, but the molecular mechanism is largely unknown. Here, we show that inducible nuclear localization of AN3 during initial leaf growth results in differential expression of important transcriptional regulators, including GROW...
Article
Cell wall networks are a common subject of research in biology, which are important for plant growth analysis, organ studies, etc. In order to automate the detection of individual cells in such cell wall networks, we propose a new segmentation algorithm. The proposed method is a network tracing algorithm, exploiting the prior knowledge of the netwo...
Article
Imaging and image processing have revolutionized plant phenotyping and are now a major tool for phenotypic trait measurement. Here we review plant phenotyping systems by examining three important characteristics: throughput, dimensionality, and resolution. First, whole-plant phenotyping systems are highlighted together with advances in automation t...
Article
Full-text available
Leaf growth is a complex developmental process that is continuously fine-tuned by the environment. Various abiotic stresses, including mild drought stress, have been shown to inhibit leaf growth in Arabidopsis thaliana (Arabidopsis), but the underlying mechanisms remain largely unknown. Here we identify the redundant Arabidopsis transcription facto...
Article
Brassinosteroid (BR) hormones control plant growth through acting on both cell expansion and division. Here, we examined the role of BRs in leaf growth using the Arabidopsis BR-deficient mutant constitutive photomorphogenesis and dwarfism (cpd). We show that the reduced size of cpd leaf blades is a result of a decrease in cell size and number, as w...
Article
Full-text available
The anaphase-promoting complex/cyclosome (APC/C) is a large multiprotein E3 ubiquitin ligase involved in ubiquitin-dependent proteolysis of key cell cycle regulatory proteins, including the destruction of mitotic cyclins at the metaphase-to-anaphase transition. Despite its importance, the role of the APC/C in plant cells and the regulation of its a...
Article
Full-text available
Auxin transport, which is mediated by specialized influx and efflux carriers, plays a major role in many aspects of plant growth and development. AUXIN1 (AUX1) has been demonstrated to encode a high-affinity auxin influx carrier. In Arabidopsis thaliana, AUX1 belongs to a small multigene family comprising four highly conserved genes (i.e., AUX1 and...
Article
Full-text available
TEOSINTE BRANCHED1/CYCLOIDEA/PROLIFERATING CELL FACTOR1 (TCP) transcription factors control developmental processes in plants. The 24 TCP transcription factors encoded in the Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) genome are divided into two classes, class I and class II TCPs, which are proposed to act antagonistically. We performed a detailed phenotyp...
Article
Full-text available
Endoreduplication is the process where a cell replicates its genome without mitosis and cytokinesis, often followed by cell differentiation. This alternative cell cycle results in various levels of endoploidy, reaching 4× or higher one haploid set of chromosomes. Endoreduplication is found in animals and is widespread in plants, where it plays a ma...
Article
Early leaf growth is sustained by cell proliferation and subsequent cell expansion that initiates at the leaf tip and proceeds in a basipetal direction. Using detailed kinematic and gene expression studies to map these stages during early development of the third leaf of Arabidopsis thaliana, we showed that the cell-cycle arrest front did not progr...
Article
Full-text available
Coordination of cell division with growth and development is essential for the survival of organisms. Mistakes made during replication of genetic material can result in cell death, growth defects, or cancer. Because of the essential role of the molecular machinery that controls DNA replication and mitosis during development, its high degree of cons...
Thesis
In contrast to humans and animals, the body plan of a plant is not completely defined within the embryonic stages. Organ formation continues throughout plant development and this iterative and modular process is continuously controlled by environmental cues such as light, gravity, temperature, humidity and chemicals. In most plant species, the abov...
Article
The study of transgenic Arabidopsis lines with altered vascular patterns has revealed key players in the venation process, but details of the vascularization process are still unclear, partly because most lines have only been assessed qualitatively. Therefore, quantitative analyses are required to identify subtle perturbations in the pattern and to...
Article
Despite the large number of genes known to affect leaf shape or size, we still have a relatively poor understanding of how leaf morphology is established. For example, little is known about how cell division and cell expansion are controlled and coordinated within a growing leaf to eventually develop into a laminar organ of a definite size. To obta...
Article
Full-text available
In multicellular organisms, morphogenesis relies on a strict coordination in time and space of cell proliferation and differentiation. In contrast to animals, plant development displays continuous organ formation and adaptive growth responses during their lifespan relying on a tight coordination of cell proliferation. How developmental signals inte...
Article
Full-text available
To efficiently capture sunlight for photosynthesis, leaves typically develop into a flat and thin structure. This development is driven by cell division and expansion, but the individual contribution of these processes is currently unknown, mainly because of the experimental difficulties to disentangle them in a developing organ, due to their tight...
Article
Full-text available
Although drought tolerance is a central concern of plant research, the translatability for crop improvement is relatively low. Here we report on a major contributing factor to this lack of success. Drought tolerance is predominately scored based on an improved survival rate under lethal conditions that, as demonstrated by our study, does not predic...
Article
Full-text available
SHORT-ROOT (SHR) and SCARECROW (SCR) are required for stem cell maintenance in the Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) root meristem, ensuring its indeterminate growth. Mutation of SHR and SCR genes results in disorganization of the quiescent center and loss of stem cell activity, resulting in the cessation of root growth. This paper reports on the...
Article
New developments in high-resolution X-ray computed tomography (HRXCT) are promising for the broader application of this non-destructive imaging method in plant sciences. Here, we demonstrate how detailed three-dimensional morphological traits can be extracted rapidly from in vivoArabidopsis thaliana seedlings without sample manipulation. Furthermor...
Article
Full-text available
Plant growth is readily analysed at the macroscopic level by measuring size and/or mass. Although it is commonly known that the rate of growth is determined by cell division and subsequent cell expansion, relatively few studies describing growth phenotypes include studies of the dynamics of these processes. Kinematic analyses provide a powerful and...
Article
Full-text available
The final size of plant organs, such as leaves, is tightly controlled by environmental and genetic factors that must spatially and temporally coordinate cell expansion and cell cycle activity. However, this regulation of organ growth is still poorly understood. The aim of this study is to gain more insight into the genetic control of leaf size in A...
Article
The growth of an organ is the result of the spatio-temporal regulation of cell division and cell expansion. We have developed kinematic analysis to quantify the role of these processes in response to perturbation of key regulatory genes. Here we report two surprising findings: the analysis of DELLA mutants shows that GA signalling affects cell divi...
Article
Full-text available
Plant growth involves the integration of many environmental and endogenous signals that together with the intrinsic genetic program determine plant size. At the cellular level, growth rate is regulated by the combined activity of two processes: cell proliferation and expansion. Gibberellins (GA) are plant-specific hormones that play a central role...

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