Alain Goossens Lab: Conceiving future sources of bioactive plant metabolites

The Alain Goossens Lab is a research unit within the VIB-UGent Center for Plant Systems Biology. Presently, a staff of 14 people is working there. It includes 6 postdocs, 7 PhD students and 1 technician, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Alain Goossens. Currently, the lab specifically focuses on the phytohormone jasmonate.

Plants are metabolic champions. «We aspire to unravel the mechanisms that steer plant metabolism in fitness programs to find novel tools for plant metabolic engineering and synthetic biology,» says Alain Goossens. «The plant kingdom synthesizes thousands of unique and bioactive specialized metabolites that have important roles in plant survival and often can offer valuable applications for humans.»

«Yet, this impressive metabolic machinery is still hardly exploited, mainly because of the limited molecular insight. Understanding the biosynthetic networks and biological functions of plant chemicals is a major objective in current plant science. Nature has invented strict, yet not fully understood, regulatory networks that control plant metabolism. These networks safeguard plant fitness in a continuously changing environment. By investigating the reprogramming of plant metabolism by developmental and environmental cues, we aim to advance our fundamental understanding of the mechanisms that steer plant metabolism,» he explains.

Jasmonates

“Jasmonates are phytohormones that steer the delicate balance between growth and defense programs in many species of plants, including the production of bioactive specialized metabolites. Plant cells are capable of producing an overwhelming variety of specialized metabolites, both in terms of complexity and quantity. These small organic molecules allow plants to cope with various types of stresses but often also have biological activities of high interest to humans,” Goossens explains.

The most well-known function of jasmonates is to signal attacks by insect herbivores or microbial pathogens, both locally and systemically, leading to mounted defences, including the activation of specialized metabolism. The central module of the jasmonates is conserved across the plant kingdom.

Understanding interactions

«Understanding when, where and why the JA signal is produced in planta, how it is perceived, how it interacts with other environmental and developmental cues, and how it is transduced to the onset of specialized metabolism will allow to capture the regulatory networks that steer the plant metabolic networks. This will enable to unlock plant specialized metabolism for numerous human applications given that our findings serve simultaneously as a novel resource for innovative engineering tools. These tools will facilitate the creation of plant-based synthetic biology platforms for the sustainable production of high-value plant metabolites. Another target is to increase crop productivity by improving plant growth, defense and fitness in a changing environment.»

Resource for new engineering tools

«Using cutting-edge functional genomics tools, in combination with reverse genetics screenings, we try to identify the essential components acting in the jasmonate signalling network and to characterize the molecular mechanisms driving plant natural product biosynthesis in crop, medicinal and model plants. Besides increasing fundamental knowledge, our gene discoveries serve as a novel resource for (metabolic) engineering tools.»

Tomatoes

Plants are continuously challenged by fungi, bacteria and other microbial organisms living in their biosphere. «We try to protect the plants by metabolic reprogramming, both within the plant and the attacker. Within UGent-funded collaborative projects, we are using our various omics platforms, including those to detect and quantify transcripts, metabolites and interactions among proteins and between proteins and metabolites, to map the determining network.»

In this the Goossens Lab also employs two types of plant-microbe combinations known to modulate plant metabolomes. «At first, we study the interaction between tomato and rhizogenic Agrobacteria, which proliferate ‘hairy roots’ on infected plants. Hairy root cultures are proven attractive and cost-effective options for the mass production of high-value plant metabolites. They can be grown in contained conditions, hence they fit to our general research mission. We particularly focus on the ‘oncoproteins’ encoded on the T-DNA of the Ri plasmid of various rhizogenic Agrobacteria strains, and assess how they reprogram both root metabolite and biomass production.»

Yet unknown fungal metabolites

«In the second, we study the interaction between tomato and a set of fungi with different lifestyles. The chemical communication between fungi and plants is determined by specialized metabolites. Just like plants, fungi possess a metabolite treasure trove, with potent applications for agriculture and human health, yet the vast majority awaits discovery, typically because their biosynthesis is silent in lab conditions. Within this project, we will establish an innovative plant-based platform to discover, study and produce yet unknown fungal metabolites. The plant-based platform will be designed based on novel, paradigm-shifting insights acquired during our earlier research on plant defense. As such, we expect it will offer unprecedented possibilities to activate and study fungal metabolism.»

InnCoCells

The Goossens Lab also participates in several international research projects. Amongst them is InnCoCells, an EU funded Horizon 2020 research and innovation project to prospect aquatic and terrestrial natural biological resources for biologically active compounds. This four-year project was launched in 2021. It aims to develop safe and sustainable plant-based cosmetics with scientifically proven effects. The 17 InnCoCells consortium partners all are European academic institutions and industrial enterprises, representing eleven countries.

About Alain Goossens

Alain Goossens obtained both his Master in Biology-Plant Biotechnology and PhD at Ghent University. During his PhD, he has also acted as a visiting researcher at CIAT in Cali (Colombia). Afterwards, as a Marie Curie EU postdoctoral fellow, he moved to the lab of Ramón Serrano at the IBMCP-UPV in Valencia (Spain) to work for 2 years on yeast salt tolerance. Returned in Belgium in 2000, he became group leader at the Flemish Institute for Biotechnology (VIB). In 2003, he started his own research group within the VIB-UGent Center for Plant Systems Biology, focusing on phytohormone signalling, gene discovery in plant specialized metabolism and metabolic engineering. In 2022, he was appointed Senior Full Professor at Ghent University. In 2020 he was elected as an EMBO fellow.