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Plant developmental biologist with a key interest in vascular tissues, cell division orientation and single cell omics at VIB/UGent 🇧🇪🇪🇺🌱

Very excited to share our new paper with @thomaseekhout.bsky.social and @bertderybel.bsky.social about benchmarking results for plant single-cell transcriptomics workflows from the same sample🌱. doi.org/10.1038/s443...

Benchmarking plant single cell RNA-sequencing sample processing strategies @carogro.bsky.social, @bertderybel.bsky.social and coworkers link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Congratulations to Ivan Kulich from IPMB, Biology Centre CAS for his new paper in Science looking at calcium, ROS and root growth @MOLIPEC www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Our latest review on the evolution of molecular networks involved in the development of plant conducting tissues is now out in @jxbotany.bsky.social @ibmcp.bsky.social Check it out here: academic.oup.com/jxb/advance-...

A few more weeks to apply for the PhD position! Cell biology and polarity in a cool developmental context: www.ru.nl/en/working-a...

Happy to announce that I have started my own research group at the MPIPZ and that I am looking for a postdoc who would like to investigate Marchantia prothallus development with me! Please spread the word and/or apply if interested :)

I am looking for a postdoctoral fellow to join my team to work on the interplay between endocytosis and autophagy. The 3-year project runs in collaboration with the Dagdas lab @plantophagy.bsky.social and can start asap. Interested candidates can apply via the link below. jobs.vib.be/apply/134365

Uncover the evolutionary secrets of plant survival. Prof. Isabel Monte is rewriting how we understand signaling and immunity at the molecular level. See her live at #PlantResearch26, don’t miss your chance to engage. Make sure your abstract is in by 25 June to be part of it: vibbio.tech/48HLZAg

Big congrats to Shunji @plant-circle10.bsky.social for obtaining an FWO junior post doc grant @psb-vib.bsky.social! Excited to have him in the team for a few more years studying procambium activation. Thanks to @fwovlaanderen.bsky.social for funding our research.

Not sure which scRNA-seq platform to use for 🪴 plant samples? How well do doublet detection algorithms really work in 🌱? How can I optimise sample prep ? Find out in our benchmark study! Led by @carogro.bsky.social and @thomaseekhout.bsky.social. Open access at EMBO Journal: doi.org/10.1038/s443...

Noel Blanco-Touriñán

The isolation of single plant cells from complex tissues is prone to selective enrichment and sampling biases, which complicates accurate profiling of the large diversity in cell types. Optimizing methodologies for cell enrichment and single-cell transcriptomics is therefore critical for single-cell studies addressing plant cell heterogeneity. Here, we systematically compared protoplast enrichment technologies (including conventional and image-based flow cytometry, as well as magnetic cell sorting) and single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) platforms (10X Genomics Chromium, BD Rhapsody) using Arabidopsis roots. Image-based flow cytometry offered increased precision due to customizable gating strategies, while magnetic sorting provided faster processing and enhanced representation of cell size heterogeneity. Both scRNA-seq platforms captured root cell heterogeneity and yielded reproducible gene expression profiles, but showed platform-associated differences in cell type composition. Notably, single-nucleotide polymorphism analysis of a mixed ecotype sample revealed that, among cells identified as doublets by computational algorithms, two-thirds were likely to have been misclassified. These insights identify key biases in plant cell purification and scRNA-seq workflows and provide practical guidance for improving data quality across plant species.

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