Van den Eynde Helena

In 2021, I graduated with a Master of Science in Biology from Ghent University. My thesis, conducted at the Rhizosphere lab, focused on identifying bacteria capable of assisting lettuce in coping with cold stress. Following graduation, I joined the Lab of Microbiology under the supervision of Professor Anne Willems at Ghent University with Professor Sofie Goormachtig of the Rhizosphere lab as my co-supervisor, contributing to the 'Soja in 1000 tuinen' project. Here, I participated in a large-scale isolation campaign aimed at discovering rhizobia strains within soybean root nodules capable of nodulating soybeans at northern latitudes. Subsequently, in 2022, I obtained an FWO grant to investigate the underlying mechanisms behind variations in nodulation efficiency among different Bradyrhizobium strains, with the goal of optimizing this interaction.