Strigolactone Signaling Through the Eye of the Mass Spectrometer
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Strigolactone signaling through the eye of the mass spectrometer Alan Walton PhD Thesis Promoters: Prof. Dr. Sofie Goormachtig Prof. Dr. Kris Gevaert 1 Strigolactone Signaling through the eye of the mass spectrometer Alan Walton Promoters: Prof. Dr. Sofie Goormachtig & Prof. Dr. Kris Gevaert Strigolactone Signaling through the eye of the mass spectrometer Ghent University Faculty of Sciences Alan Walton Department of Plant Biotechnology and Bioinformatics DepartmentPromotors: Prof.of Plant Dr. SystemsSofie Goormachtig Biology & Prof. Dr. Kris Gevaert VIB Department of Plant Systems Biology Research funded by VIB International PhD grant Dissertation submitted un fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor (PhD) in Sciences: Biochemistry, Biotechnology Ghent University Faculty of Sciences Department of Plant Biotechnology and Bioinformatics Department of Plant Systems Biology VIB Department of Plant Systems Biology Research funded by VIB International PhD grant Dissertation submitted un fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor (PhD) in Sciences: Biochemistry, Biotechnology 2 3 Thanks to After almost 4 years of working in Belgium, the time has come to acknowledge the many different people that have contributed to making this project a success. I’m going to start at the very top of the pyramid, with my PIs and my guiding post-doc as these are without a doubt the people that I made suffer the most! To Sofie (aka. Wendy/Bob), thank you for creating an atmosphere in the lab that makes us all happy to come in in the mornings. The strong ties between the members of the group are the fruit of your great team management and have made these 4 years really enjoyable. I will take with me lots of great memories from numerous team building (with a special place for the canoeing!), Christmas dinners and summer BBQs that you organized for us. I am also enormously grateful for all of the input you have given to my project. I think you described it best when you told me that I’m someone who emits a lot of ‘random’ energy and your job is to canalize it for me so I can put it to good use. Without your guidance and critical assessment of my work I do not dare to think where I might have ended up. To Kris, I would like to start by thanking you for sharing your enthusiasm for proteomics with me. I really enjoyed gradually discovering this world and it provided me with new and interesting challenges which kept the PhD interesting until the end. We all saw as well the enormous effort that you made to dive into the world of plant research and I would even dare to venture that we have almost converted you into a fully flung Arabidopsis specialist (don’t worry, it can be our secret!). Thanks to both you for the countless manuscript corrections and guidance meetings as well as just general support and opportunities that you gave me during my time in your labs. I was looking through my emails the other day and I found at least 10 emails from both of you that were either sent at ridiculously early morning hours or even on the 25th December to help me push my papers through and to solve problems we were encountering in experiments. I know that you guys consider this to be ‘normal’ but I really think that you are exceptional promoters that really invest a lot of time in the projects of your PhDs and I think this is really reflected in what we managed to achieve at the end of this work. Next on the list, Miss Elisabeth. In order to properly thank you I would need to write a good chapter or 2! I don’t think there is anywhere on this planet another post-doc that invested as much time as you did in helping their PhDs. Thank you for all the corrections that you did on my manuscripts and on my thesis and also thank you for creating opportunities for me to work on exciting projects, like the original COFRADIC 4 paper. I am also very grateful for all of the soft skills that you taught me over the time that I worked for you. I’m fairly confident that the protocol for persuading mass spec people to run our samples will be transferable and very useful in my future ventures! You also really helped me to integrate when I arrived a helped me get through some more difficult patches when I doubted whether the PhD was really something for me. So to wrap up, I guess the best way that I can thank all 3 of you will be to do you proud on the day itself (so once I’m done writing this I am going straight to lock myself in my house for the next 6 weeks for solid revision!). Next up is the lab members! I’ll start with the plant side first and with my PC neighbor Mister C. Thanks for the fun times in the lab, the conversations, the messing around and the general nice atmosphere. Also I huge thank you for showing me the ropes in Arabidopsis research when I first got to the lab. I wish you great success for the future. Next to Lukas for the great 9 months which we worked together on my project in the beginning and then for the general fun in the lab the years afterwards (especially letting me destroy you systematically in squash…it really helped to keep my self-esteem high). I think that both of you really make a massive effort to integrate foreigners, and at least in my case it really made the whole adventure much more enjoyable. Miss Sylvia, thanks for very delicately helping me find motivation in times where I had lost momentum (although next time maybe not in front of a car full of people ). But really, I needed to hear it and it was really fun collaborating with you for the last 1 year. I’m really happy to have met you (and am still waiting for the invitation to come to discover Poland!). Miss Justine, thanks for bringing a bit of crazy frenchness to the lab and listening to me nag about how I would never manage to finish the PhD. Your endless organizing of social event really contributed to making the rhizo lab THE best lab in PSB. To Annick, the lab GPS and queen of cloning, thanks for taking the time to explain gateway cloning, touch down PCR, crazy cloning techniques for difficult genes….and the list goes on! You really helped me to improve my labs skills and without you I think all of our projects would just grind to a halt! To Carolien, thanks for the insight that you gave to my project and the help to get going in the beginning and the friendly chats to distract me when results weren’t going the way they should have been. Mister Tom, although I’m not fully happy about the fact that now I’m no longer the squash god of the lab, it was really great working in the same lab and thanks for all the critical insight that you gave that has helped to improve my project. Finally to Tibby, Stein and Sarah, the newest editions to the lab, thanks for all the fun we’ve had so far and also for bringing a bit of diversity to the lab with some cool talks about new topics (although I still don’t understand the rubix cube slide! But I guess I did learn how many different groups of bacteria you can make from 25 strains). Finally, not really a lab member, but for sure important, Mister W!!! So much fun! We really had a great time! Thanks for all the nice moments, whatever happens we have to keep in touch. Next to the mass spec lab! First the MS gods themselves. To Evy, An, PJ, Jonathan and later Jarne, Delphi and Francis thanks for always being there to rescue our experiments. A special thanks to An and Evy for their impressive patience in the face of my endless list of random mass spec questions! To Giel, Emmy thanks for including me in the team and making my ‘adoption’ by the second lab much easier (and also 5 holding my hand whilst I was crying from fear on the plane back from Spain!). PJ thanks for all the crazy fun…I must say though, Odette de La Planche is still wondering why you haven’t sent her your PhD diploma and Mathias’ insurance company has been trying to contact you for like a year now! It’s cool to have you back in the lab. Miss Kim, my office buddy! Thanks for all the fun talks and laugh. It really made working in Rommelaere a lot of fun and you taught me a lot as well. Several Post-Doc and Professors also contributed greatly to this work through either fruitful scientific discussions or support. From PSB, I would like to thank Ive, Laurens and Alain for providing both data and support to help us get the Ubiquitin COFRADIC paper into TPC. From MBC, a big thank you to Petra and Sven for the interesting scientific discussion that helped us to view our research from a new angle. To Sven, the optimization experiment that you suggested really did help us to get the most of this project and to Petra thanks for reassuring me even after my paper got rejected for the 10th time! To the guys from squash, Nathan, Jonas, Fabi, Mibon and Phil thanks for helping me discover the sport and also for changing my ideas and providing me with a much needed pressure release every week.