On December 2, Professor Dr. Lieven De Veylder of Ghent University in Belgium, which is a partner university of the School of Agriculture of Meiji University, visited the School of Agriculture and delivered a special lecture on the theme of “Restoring a Damaged Root Stem Cell Niche.” Professor Lieven De Veylder was invited by Associate Professor TAKAHASHI Naoki of the School of Agriculture, and many people including students and faculty participated in the lecture.
Professor Lieven De Veylder has been teaching such topics as genetic engineering, plant functional genomics, cell cycle, and plant cell biology as a professor at Ghent University since 2008. He is also the chairperson of the Biochemistry and Biotechnology Education Program, which has more than 350 students enrolled.
His field of expertise is the cell cycle and checkpoint control of plants, and the maintenance mechanism of stem cells. In the lecture, he mentioned that plants have a remarkable regenerative ability not only to repair damaged tissues and organs, but also to reconstruct a new plant body, and explained the mechanism to maintain stem cells and to enable them to function, which is the basis of the ability. In particular, he explained that the ERF115 transcription factor is rapidly induced by damaged cells and plays an important role in replenishing collapsed stem cells. Further, he explained the mechanism by which ERF115 activates cell division to fully restore stem cell niches even when stem cells are damaged, in detail, to the participants.
In the Q&A session after the lecture, many questions were asked about the maintenance mechanism of stem cells and molecular mechanism of regeneration, and lively discussions were held.
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