Today is the International Day for Women and Girls in Science. We use this opportunity to spotlight Professor Karin Ljung, one of our scientists who has been at UPSC since it was formed in 1999. Her dedication, not at least as head of department, at one of the two UPSC departments has helped to transition UPSC to where it is now. Here, you can read more about Karin Ljung’s career, how she experienced the development at UPSC towards a better gender balance and about her ideas to inspire the next generation of women in science.
What made you become interested in science?
Karin Ljung: I believe I have always been interested in natural sciences, especially biology. Some of my other interests when I was young was astronomy and paleontology (read dinosaurs), and I always liked mathematics. My parents were very supportive, although they never had a chance to study themselves. We spent much of our free time in our cottage and in the forest, fishing, picking berries and mushrooms etc. When I started my biology studies at Umeå University, I also got very interested in the chemistry part of the education, and my research interests since then have been at the intersection between biology and chemistry.
You worked long as research engineer before you started your PhD. What motivated you to take this step?
Karin Ljung: Coming from a family with no academic traditions and living in a small town in northern Sweden, I did not have any good role models and examples for an academic career. So, it was really a big step for me to do a PhD. Finally, I realized that I was stupid not to do so. I was fortunate at that time to be working in a research group at UPSC with a very good supervisor and mentor, Professor Göran Sandberg. He gave me all the support and freedom that I needed to pursue a research career, and he has been a real source of inspiration for me.
What kind of obstacles did you have to overcome during your career? What has helped you in your career?
Karin Ljung: I feel that the main obstacles have been my background and my introvert personality, that made me feel very uncertain of my potential. I have worked really hard to overcome my natural shyness and to become bolder. I’m not sure that I have succeeded though, but at least I have improved.
One reason that I have been working at the same department since 2000 is that the Department of Forest Genetics and Plant Physiology was and is a great place to work at, with a really supportive and friendly atmosphere. When I started my own research group in 2005, I also received monetary support from the UPSC Berzelii Centre, especially focused on supporting early career female group leaders. This support, as well as the continuous support from Kempestiftelserna, has been instrumental for me in order to establish and develop my independent research group at UPSC.
Do you think that more gender equality benefits science?
Karin Ljung: Definitely, diversity is always positive, and all workplaces benefit from better gender equality. Still, there are many obstacles that need to be tackled, especially for women. Science is very competitive, and we need to make it possible for young scientists to combine family life with research, and make sure that they get continuous support to be productive during their whole research career.
Since 2007, UPSC is working on achieving its goal of 40-60 percent women at all career stages and currently 45 percent of the group leaders are female. How did you experience this development throughout the years?
Karin Ljung: It has been very positive! When I started, very few women were group leaders and professors. Also, UPSC was not the international workplace that it is now. I am very happy with the recruitments that we have made at UPSC during the recent years. We now have a group of early and middle career scientists that are very skilled and productive, and I’m confident that they will continue to keep UPSC at the forefront of plant biology.
What do you think we can do to inspire the next generation of women in science?
Karin Ljung: Good role models are very important, and we need to show that it is possible (and fun!) to do research. There are very few jobs that have the same amount of freedom as research, and it is important not to kill enthusiasm and creativity with “new public management”.
For six years you have been the head of the Department of Forest Genetics and Plant Physiology at UPSC. Do you have any suggestions to the current UPSC management to improve gender equality at UPSC?
Karin Ljung: We need to have good recruitment strategies to attract top researchers to UPSC, and there are many excellent women in that group. Continued support for young researchers is also very important, there are always periods in research careers when funding is running low, and it can be difficult to be productive. Also, it is important that teaching and academic housework is spread even between men and women, in order to benefit, instead of being an obstacle, for their careers.
Karin Ljung worked for several years as research engineer, first at SLU in Umeå and then at Umeå University, before she started her PhD studies at SLU in 1996. After finishing her PhD in 2002, she started her own research group in 2005 and was appointed professor in 2015. Her research focuses on root development and root to shoot communication, with special emphasis on the roles of growth regulating compounds like plant hormones during these developmental processes. Many of her research findings have been published in highly cited journals, resulting in Karin Ljung being on the Clarivate Analytics list of Highly Cited Researchers for nine years in a row now. In 2009, she received the OlChemim Award for her research on plant hormones, and in 2019 she received the Scandinavian Plant Physiology Society Award. During her career, Karin Ljung has accepted several additional commissions within UPSC, but also at the faculty and national level. Among others, she was for several years member of the Faculty Board of the Faculty of Forest Sciences at SLU, as well as Deputy Dean and Dean of the Faculty of Forest Sciences. From 2016 until 2021, she was the Head of the SLU Department of Forest Genetics and Plant Physiology, one of the two Departments that form UPSC. At the same time, she was also member of the Scientific Council at Formas, a Swedish governmental research council for sustainable development.
More about Karin Ljung’s research
Two professors at UPSC are assigned decision-making roles in promoting Swedish research and innovation. Stefan Jansson has been elected the Chairman of the Class for biosciences at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences making him also a member of the Academy Board. Ove Nilsson has been elected to Formas´ Scientific Council, where UPSC professor Karin Ljung previously was a member. The appointments reflect Stefan Jansson’s and Ove Nilsson’s established stand in the scientific community.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences is most known for awarding the Nobel Prizes. Its overall objective is to promote science of the highest quality by fostering development and innovation in Swedish research. As member of the Academy Board and Chairman of the Class for biosciences, Stefan Jansson will be also involved in planning activities of the Academy and making sure that the available resources will be used efficiently. He will join his first board meeting on the 3rd of February 2022.
“I have been a member of the Class for biosciences since 2014 and now I am honored to expand my work for the Academy,” says Stefan Jansson.
About one week later, on the 10th of February, Ove Nilsson is meeting for the first time with the new Formas´ Scientific Council that has been elected for the term 2022-2024. The Scientific Council is the decision-making body of Formas, a government research council for sustainable development. Formas funds research within the areas of environment, agricultural sciences and spatial planning.
“I am looking forward to meeting the new Scientific Council and to contributing in decisions aiming for a more sustainable world”, says Ove Nilsson.
Read more about the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
Link to the Academy Board at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
Read more about Formas
Link to the Scientific Council at Formas (in Swedish)
The European Research Council (ERC) announced today the winners of the ERC Starting Grants. One of them is Petra Marhava who will use this grant to understand better how plants deal with temperature variations which are expected to increase through the climate change. The call from ERC is highly competitive covering all disciplines of research. Petra Marhava will receive for her project "Hot-and-Cold" about €1.5 million and use this money to start her own group at UPSC.
High and cold temperatures can negatively affect growth and development of plants. Petra Marhava, researcher at the Department of Forest Genetics and Plant Physiology at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, wants to understand what happens in the cell under such temperature stress. She will focus on the plant hormone auxin and analyse how it helps the plant to adjust its growth and development under cold or heat.
“I started to work with auxin during my PhD thesis and there is already much known about how it controls growth and development but there is still a lot of information missing about the regulation of auxin transport during temperature stress responses,” says Petra Marhava. “I want to fill this gap and study what happens on the cellular and molecular level when plants experience cold or heat. I think that this knowledge is needed to figure out how climate variability will impact agriculture and natural ecosystems.”
Petra Marhava will work with the model organism Arabidopsis thaliana, focusing on the root that is easy to access with advanced imaging techniques. She plans to use high-resolution imaging techniques with a temperature-controlled stage system. This will allow her to control the ambient temperature and directly monitor the changes that appear in the cells under cold or heat treatment. She will complement these studies with additional large-scale analyses of proteins and gene activities and with chemical genomic screen.
After her master’s degree in Molecular Biology, Petra Marhava worked as cytogeneticist at the National Cancer Institute of Slovak Republic. In 2015, she finished her PhD in Jiří Friml’s group at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria and moved then on to a postdoc in Christian Hardtke’s group at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland before she joined UPSC in 2020. Petra Marhava was finalist of the 2020 New Phytologist Tansley Medal for excellence in plant science and received in November 2021 a starting grant from the Swedish Research Council. She will start setting up her group at UPSC in summer 2022 when she comes back from her maternity leave.
The European Research Council, Europe’s premiere funding organisation for research and innovation, awarded in total 397 early-career researchers from 45 nationalities with ERC Starting Grants. The projects come from a broad range of different disciplines and the call is very competitive with a success rate of about ten percent. More than 4000 proposals were submitted to last year’s call. The selected proposals will be carried out in 22 countries belonging to or associated with the European Union (EU). This was the first call under the EU’s new Research & Innovation programme Horizon Europe with an investment of €619 million.
Link to the press release from the European Research Council
For more information, please contact:
Petra Marhava
Umeå Plant Science Centre
Department of Forest Genetics and Plant Physiology
Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
Email:
Twitter: @MarhavaPetra
The Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research, SSF, announced that three projects from UPSC will receive funding. Main applicants of the projects in the call for “biotechnology and plant breeding – food, feed and forest” are María Rosario García-Gil, Stefan Jansson and Ove Nilsson. They plan to develop models for the sustainable development of future forest trees using biotechnology and new digital tools.
Conventional tree breeding is slow. It takes about 25 years to complete a breeding cycle for pine and spruce. Ove Nilsson, professor at the Department of Forest Genetics and Plant Physiology at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU), and his co-applicants Jens Sundström, SLU Uppsala, Harry Wu, UPSC and Mari Suontama, Skogforsk, want to address this problem by making Norway spruce mature faster so that they set their cones earlier. With the help of this they will develop a new tool for rapid breeding of trees that are better adapted to a new climate and new diseases.
“Forestry in Sweden currently faces several problems. The demand for forest products increases but also the need to preserve biodiversity and counteract climate change. We hope that our research can contribute to solve some of these problems”, says Ove Nilsson who is also the director of UPSC. “Researchers from UPSC submitted several research projects for this call from SSF and it is fantastic news that three of them got approved. I am very delighted about this outcome. This is a nice Christmas present not only for me and my co-applicants but for all of UPSC.”
María Rosario García-Gil, researcher at the same department as Ove Nilsson at SLU, and her co-applicants from SLU Umeå and Uppsala, Skogforsk and RISE plan to address the same problem: to shorten the breeding cycle of Norway spruce. However, they are going for a completely different approach which they call “landscape breeding”. They want to develop a digital breeding tool for Norway spruce that helps to speed up the breeding cycle and in parallel allows for the preservation of biodiversity. Using remote sensors, they plan to monitor tree quality and health as well as local environmental data and combine this with modern DNA analyses.
“Our approach is based on commercial forests of Norway spruce. The trees originally derive from breeding programs but are openly pollinated by surrounding trees”, explains María Rosario García-Gil. “The sensor data will help us to identify trees with outstanding features like for example better growth, trunk quality and health and link the tree performance to environmental data on a landscape scale. We will use DNA analyses to identify the underlying genetic relationships and incorporate all data into breeding strategies. This procedure will fasten the breeding process without compromising key biotopes that are important to preserve biodiversity.”
When optimising plant growth, the capacity of photosynthesis and nitrogen are often limiting factors. Stefan Jansson, professor at the Department of Plant Physiology at Umeå University, and his co-applicants Olivier Keech from the same department and Henrik Böhlenius from SLU Alnarp, want to enhance photosynthesis and also optimize nitrogen balance in deciduous trees.
“We must set aside forests in Sweden to preserve biodiversity, but we need, in parallell, to increase the productivity in other areas to meet the increasing need for forest products”, says Stefan Jansson. “One way to address this is short rotation plantations with fast growing trees like aspen and poplars. If they could be coupled to bio-CCS (carbon capture and storage) they would provide raw material/energy while giving negative carbon dioxide emissions. We hope to make such plantations economically more attractive by improving their productivity and reducing nitrogen input and therefore contributing to Sweden’s goal to become carbon neutral by 2045.”
The call “Biotechnology and plant breeding – food, feed and forest” from the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research (SSF) is a multidisciplinary biotechnological initiative that focused on plant breeding. The long-term goal is to make Sweden more self-sufficient and strengthen its exports while reducing the climate impact. Together with a fourth project from KTH Stockholm the projects will share 120 million SEK. The funding is assigned for a five-year period.
Link to the press release from SSF
The projects
- Landscape Breeding: A new paradigm in forest tree management
Main applicant and contact:
María Rosario García-Gil, Umeå Plant Science Centre, Department of Forest Genetics and Plant Physiology, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
Email:
http://www.upsc.se/rosario_garcia
Co-applicants: Eva Lindberg, Johan Holmgren and Kenneth Olofsson, the Department of Forest Resource Management, SLU Umeå, Thomas Lundmark, Department of Forest Ecology and Management, SLU Umeå, Malin Elfstrand and Jan Stenlid, Department of Forest Mycology and Plant Pathology, SLU Uppsala, Nicolas Delhomme, Umeå Plant Science Centre, Department of Forest Genetics and Plant Physiology, SLU Umeå, Mari Suontamaa, Skogforsk and Gerhard Scheepers, RISE
- Trees that grow better
Main applicant and contact:
Stefan Jansson, Umeå Plant Science Centre, Department of Plant Physiology, Umeå University
E-mail:
https://www.upsc.se/stefan_jansson
Co-applicants: Olivier Keech, Umeå Plant Science Centre, Department of Plant Physiology, Umeå University and Henrik Böhlenius, Southern Swedish Forest Research Centre, SLU Alnarp
- Rapid-Cycling Breeding
Main applicant and contact:
Ove Nilsson, Umeå Plant Science Centre, Department of Forest Genetics and Plant Physiology, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
E-mail:
http://www.upsc.se/ove_nilsson
Co-applicants: Jens Sundström, Department of Plant Biology, SLU Uppsala, Harry Wu, Umeå Plant Science Centre, Department of Forest Genetics and Plant Physiology, SLU Umeå and Mari Suontama from Skogforsk
[2021-12-08] During yesterday’s traditional UPSC Christmas lunch, Clément Boussardon was awarded with the UPSC Agrisera Prize 2021. He is acknowledged for his scientific achievements resulting in establishing valuable methods for the scientific community and his commitment for the UPSC community and work environment. The prize was handed over by Catherine Bellini, chairmen of the UPSC Board, and Fanny Högdahl from Agrisera.
Clément Boussardon came to UPSC in 2017 joining Olivier Keech’s group as postdoc. During his time at UPSC, he developed methods to tissue-specifically isolate plant organelles and contributed to establish a gene atlas for iron containing proteins. Most of these tools are already published and available for the scientific community at UPSC and beyond. Clément Boussardon engages actively in scientific discussions at UPSC trying to help advancing also other research projects.
Besides his scientific contribution, Clément Boussardon took responsibility to improve the work environment at UPSC. He was part of the group organising a new common laboratory that was established in 2019 and he continuously helps to improve the laboratory organisation with suggestions and active support. One of the two nominations that were send in for Clément Boussardon even pointed out that he is organising floorball games for the UPSC community in his free time.
“There are many people at UPSC who we would like to acknowledge and thank for their work and the commitment they invest into making UPSC a good place to work,” says Catherine Bellini, chairmen of the UPSC Board who announced the winner of the prize. “It is every year very difficult to choose one out of several good suggestions, but I think the board took a very good decision.”
Six nomination letters were sent in for this year’s UPSC Agrisera Prize. Two of them were for Clément Boussardon. The Prize - a travel voucher - is sponsored by Agrisera and awards every year a PhD student, postdoc or technician for excellent scientific achievement and great commitment to improve the work environment at UPSC. Everyone working at UPSC can nominate a colleague for the UPSC Agrisera Prize and the members of the UPSC board select the winner of the prize.
The Swedish governmental research council for sustainable development, Formas, granted last week the research projects of Stefan Jansson, Peter Kindgren and Hannele Tuominen. The researchers plan to study how aspen trees regulate autumn senescence, develop a GMO-free approach to improve crops and identify aspen trees that use nitrogen most efficiently for short-rotation cultivation.
A changing climate might change the length of the growing season and trees need to adjust the time when they shed their leaves to the changing conditions. Stefan Jansson, Professor at the Department of Plant Physiology at Umeå University, plans to investigate how autumn senescence is regulated in different, naturally occurring aspen trees and build on the knowledge that he and his group has already gained throughout the last years.
Their idea is to identify genes that play a role in the regulation of autumn senescence and use them to select trees with promising features but also to introduce targeted gene modifications in hybrid aspen. This collection of aspen trees will be tested under different conditions in the greenhouse and in the field to see how suited they are for breeding programmes. Stefan Jansson and his group plan to combine this project with a citizen science project on autumn senescence.
Peter Kindgren, researcher at the Department of Forest Genetics and Plant Physiology at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU), plants to address a completely other problem. He aims on developing an approach to improve crops without genetical modification as the current regulations in the European Union do not allow to use such plants in agriculture. His idea is to use a plant internal mechanism to activate genes and like this make them for example more tolerant to cold.
The herbaceous plant Arabidopsis thaliana will be used as model to develop the GMO-free approach. Peter Kindgren and his group will focus on genes that allow plants to acclimatize to cold and compare their novel approach with traditional genetical modification techniques. When they have established the approach for Arabidopsis thaliana, the researchers want to transfer their approach to the commercially important crops barley and wheat.
Hannele Tuominen, professor at the Department of Forest Genetics and Plant Physiology at SLU, wants to understand in her granted project how trees use nitrogen for wood formation. Nitrogen is the main growth limiting factor in boreal forests but adding nitrogen fertilizer to increase the productivity of the forest can affect the surrounding environment negatively. Hannele Tuominen and her group will study how different nitrogen forms and concentrations will affect the chemistry, structure and mechanical properties of the wood.
The researchers will focus on a natural collection of different Swedish Aspen trees. By comparing those trees and their reaction on different nitrogen treatments, they hope to understand better how nitrogen is used for wood formation. Their goal is to identify those trees that use nitrogen most efficiently to reduce the negative effect of nitrogen fertilisation without impairing valuable wood properties. According to the researchers, this selection of trees might help to make short-rotation cultivation of hybrid aspen more attractive in Sweden.
The projects:
- How do trees survive winter?
Stefan Jansson
Umeå Plant Science Centre
Department of Plant Physiology
Umeå University
Email:
https://www.upsc.se/stefan_jansson
- A GMO-free approach in plants to boost food production
Peter Kindgren
Umeå Plant Science Centre
Department of Forest Genetics and Plant Physiology
Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
Email:
https://www.upsc.se/peter_kindgren
- Towards improved nitrogen use efficiency in aspen trees
Hannele Tuominen
Umeå Plant Science Centre
Department of Forest Genetics and Plant Physiology
Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
Email:
https://www.upsc.se/hannele_tuominen
Link to the announcement from Formas
Climate change with its extreme temperatures and fluctuating precipitations is affecting agricultural land conditions and crop yields. Therefore it is essential to understand and improve the details of plant growth. Laxmi Mishra has developed new knowledge about a family of chloroplast proteases called FtsH. She is defending her dissertation at Umeå University.
Proteases are proteins that degrade other proteins; they either clean the cell from malfunctioning enzymes, activate them or generate signals. Hence its the inevitable fate of a protein to meet a protease in its lifetime.
“While the importance of proteases for cell survival and for various diseases is well known, my work deals with inactivated proteases (pseudo-proteases), which therefore could be seen as “anti-heros””, Laxmi laughs.
Laxmi Mishra’s work focuses on a family of proteases called FtsH, which are present in human, animals, plants and bacteria. She is using the annual weed Arabidopsis thaliana as model organism. Plants do not only contain active FtsH proteases, but even some with mutations rendering them proteolytically inactive (termed FtsHis; i for inactive).
“Even though these enzymes are not functioning as proteases, we found them to be extremely important for the survival of plants.” says Laxmi.
Laxmi Mishra used molecular biological, biochemical and physiological methods to reveal the role of these inactive FtsH pseudo-proteases. She compared wild-type Arabidopsis thaliana plants with mutants depleted in single FtsHi proteins and exposed these plants to various stresses in controlled laboratory conditions, but even outside in the field.
Interestingly, Laxmi found that absence of one of the Ftshi enzyme improves drought tolerance in Arabidopsis thaliana. In a collaborative study carried out partly at UC Berekely/USDA in Professor Devin Coleman-Derr lab, she showed that the mutant plants sense the drought stress, but do not act according to it.
About the dissertation:
On Thursday, the 2nd of December, Laxmi Mishra, Department of Chemistry at Umeå University, defends her PhD thesis titled FtsH metalloproteases and their pseudo-proteases in the chloroplast envelope of Arabidopsis thaliana. Her supervisor is Christiane Funk who is associated group leader at UPSC.
The dissertation takes place at 14.00 in Glasburen, KBC Building, Umeå University and be live broadcasted via Zoom. Faculty opponent is professor Catherine de Vitry, Institut de Biologie Physico-Chimique, Sorbonne University, France.
For more information, please contact:
Laxmi Mishra
Department of Chemistry
Umeå University
E-mail:
Phone: +46 90 786 60 13
Text: Anna-Lena Lindskog
Last week, SLU Global awarded Rosario García Gil from UPSC with seed funding for a collaboration project with Associate Professor Dhurva Gauchan from Kathmandu University. They plan to start a programme to sustainably marketize local medicinal plants from Nepal and such preserve such plants from extinction. Local communities will be the basis of the project. They shall be provided with knowledge and skills about plant nursing and marketing.
Many medicinal plants in Nepal are on the risk of extinction because of overexploitation for medicinal uses. The project of Rosario García Gil and Dhurva Gauchan aims on preventing species extinction and reducing the negative consequences of it on the local communities. Their idea is to involve the local communities in the preservation of endangered plants by training them on how to grow and nurse these plants in a sustainable way. In parallel they will be introduced to marketing and connected to national and international markets to enable them to rise an income by selling the plants.
“The indigenous people in Nepal are directly dependent on plant resources for food, shelter, medicine, and other needs which is one of the big reasons behind forest destruction and environmental degradation,” says Rosario García Gil, researcher at UPSC and Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. “We hope that we can counteract this development by activating this programme.”
One of the competence-building activities will be a training programme on herbal cultivation and nursery management for school children and local communities. The researchers plan to build a school medicinal plant garden. The students will be responsible for looking after the plants as part of their extra-curricular activities. This shall provide them not only with knowledge and gardening skills but also help to develop a bond with nature.
“My role has been to design the project and raise the funding. Now my colleague Dhurva Gauchan will take care of the operative aspects. Basically, he will conduct the project and I will supervise it”, explains Rosario García Gil. “I especially plan to keep an eye on the involvement of women. We want to ensure a fifty percent female participation as they are more disadvantaged in Nepal. If this project can help to improve their situation a little bit for example by facilitating them to start their own micro business by cultivating and commercializing medicinal plants, I will call the project successful.”
SLU Global awarded in total six of twenty submitted projects initiated by SLU employees. The projects are transdisciplinary and incorporate strong collaborations with researchers and practitioners in low-income or lower middle-income countries. The goal of the annual call from SLU Global is to support SLU’s work for global development and contribute to the UN’s sustainability goals and Agenda 2030.
Title of the project: Rescue, collection, and conservation of rare, endangered and threatened medicinal plants of Nepal
More information about SLU Global
For questions, please contact:
Rosario García Gil
Umeå Plant Science Centre
Department of Forest Genetics and Plant Physiology
Umeå Plant Science Centre
Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
E-mail:
Twitter: @GarciaGilllab1
https://www.upsc.se/rosario_garcia
Evgeniy Donev, PhD student in Ewa Mellerowicz group at UPSC, investigated different modification strategies to genetically improve hybrid aspen for biofuel production. The idea is to make sugars in wood cell walls that are the basis for biofuel production, better accessible by modifying the cell wall structure. Based on his results, Evgeniy Donev suggests using gentle modifications restricted to certain tissues and test them both in the greenhouse and under field conditions. He also advices to be cautious when introducing fungal proteins because they can trigger an immune response just by its presence. Evgeniy Donev will defend his PhD thesis at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences on Tuesday, 16th of November 2021.
How did you get to know about your PhD project and what aroused your interest in it?
Nicolas Delhomme and Nathaniel Street from UPSC were teachers of mine during my master’s degree in Civil Engineering in Biotechnology at Umeå University. Via a student bioinformatic project, I met my PhD supervisor Ewa Mellerowicz. Already during my studies, I realized that I do not only want to do bioinformatics but also know more about the biology behind. Ewa Mellerowicz planned a whole series of experiments and wanted to analyse them with a broad range of different techniques including also complex methods that produce a vast amount of data and require some bioinformatic knowledge. I was very interested in this and when I finished my master thesis in her group, I did not want to finish the project. Luckily, she thought the same and offered me to continue as a PhD student.
You chose as subtitle of your thesis “From design to the field”. Why do you think is this important?
My thesis addresses several problems important for improving trees - in our case hybrid aspen - for biorefinery and biofuel production. We identified the best engineering strategies based on experiments in the greenhouse and outside in the field. To evaluate the performance of promising genetically improved plants, it is important to test them in an environment which represents their usual cultivation conditions. In many cases, genetically modified plants grow well in the greenhouse but show undesirable reactions in the field conditions where they must cope with a multitude of different stresses like drought or pathogen attacks. Such undesirable reactions or off-target effects can erase all positive effects coming from the gene modification.
What is the best engineering strategy to modify hybrid aspen trees for biofuel production?
We investigated a collection of hybrid aspen in which cell wall properties were modified in different ways to make cellulose and the contained sugars better accessible for biofuel production. Trees in which the modification was introduced to the whole plant developed stronger off-target effects than trees in which the modification was restricted to certain tissues of the plant like for example the wood.
Some of our trees grew better in the greenhouse and in the field. The relative sugar amount that we extracted from those trees was not much higher than in non-modified trees, but they contributed with more biomass. So, the total amount of sugars was higher. On the contrary, we saw that we lose already all wins gained through the modification when the modified trees grew twenty percent less than non-modified trees. Our conclusion is that nothing can replace reduction in growth, and we should therefore choose gentle and more specific engineering strategies.
Which of your results was the most unexpected for you?
We expressed a protein from a wood decaying fungus in hybrid aspen that is supposed to loosen up the cell wall structure and thus make cellulose better accessible. It looked like the improvement worked because we could extract more sugar from these trees, but the off-target effects were really strong. The trees were dwarf, dropped their leaves very early and showed strong immune defence reactions. Only when we restricted the activity of the protein to the wood, all off-target effects were avoided, and the plants looked normal. However, I started to wonder if just the presence of the fungal gene could be recognised by the plant and trigger an immune response. To test this, we introduced an inactive version of the protein into hybrid aspen, and we saw the same strong effects on the plant. It turned out that the protein we introduced is recognized by the plant as pathogenic and causes an immune response. Sugars are remobilized as part of this response to supply the plant immune system with the necessary energy, which could possibly affect the sugar concentration extracted from the wood of these plants.
What were the biggest challenges you faced during your PhD?
My group is focussing on cell wall formation in the wood and not on plant-pathogen interaction. It was very challenging to convince them that the changes we saw in those trees in which the fungal protein was active all over the plant, is coming from the reaction of the immune system and not from the activity of the introduced fungal protein. I had to dig deep into the available literature and develop my analytical skills, think through my story thoroughly and keep on discussing with my group. I am very grateful to Ewa Mellerowicz because her support and trust in my skills combined with her positively demanding attitude was motivating me a lot during this time.
What are you planning to do now?
Research in plant science will be in one way or the other part of my future, not least that I see that there are many open questions that are not answered yet. I plan to stay in the group of Ewa Mellerowicz for the next year. We have several very exciting projects which we are currently working on, and I hope that we generate useful knowledge that helps to better understand the complex plant system.
About the public defence:
Evgeniy Donev, Umeå Plant Science Centre, Department of Forest Genetics and Plant Physiology, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, will defend his PhD thesis on Tuesday, 16th of November 2021. Faculty opponent will be Sharon Regan, Department of Biology, Queens University, Kingston Ontario, Canada. The thesis was supervised by Ewa Mellerowicz. The dissertation will be live broadcasted via Zoom.
Title of the thesis: Modification of forest trees by genetic engineering - From design to the field
Link to the thesis: https://pub.epsilon.slu.se/25690/
For more information, please contact:
Evgeniy Donev
Umeå Plant Science Centre
Department of Forest Genetics and Plant Physiology
Umeå Plant Science Centre
Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
Email:
The Swedish Research Council granted last week four projects from UPSC. Stefan Jansson, Karin Ljung and Ewa Mellerowicz received a project grant and Petra Marhava receives a starting grant to establish her own group at UPSC. All four will address basic research questions aiming on understanding plant development and their interaction with their environment. In addition, Formas approved one applied project the week before where Olivier Keech is involved and that aims to use artificial intelligence to make urban food production more sustainable.
Stefan Jansson, professor at the Department of Plant Physiology at Umeå University, focuses in his research on the mechanisms that allow trees to survive the winter. The new project is based on previous research. It aims to use a systems biology approach to understand how autumn leaf senescence is regulated on the molecular level. A second part of the project focusses on a novel regulatory mechanism that allows conifers to keep their needles green during winter. Stefan Jansson and his group want to look deeper into this mechanism in conifer trees and also try to see which role it plays in leaf shedding trees.
The group of Karin Ljung, who is professor at the Department of Forest Genetics and Plant Physiology at SLU, is researching on root development and shoot-root communication. In the new project, they will investigate how lateral roots are initiated focusing on the processes that are happening within the root cells, particularly on the role of the different cell compartments. They aim to develop new methods to analyse plant growth regulators, metabolites, proteins and gene activity on the cellular and subcellular level in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana to better understand the complex interplay between these components during later root initiation.
Petra Marhava, who is currently working as researcher affiliated with Stéphanie Robert’s group at SLU, is also working with Arabidopsis thaliana roots but wants to understand how cold or heat stress affects the transport of auxin, a plant growth regulator involved in root formation. High or low temperatures change the physical properties of the cell membrane and Petra Marhava wants to see with the help of advanced imaging techniques how these physical changes influence auxin transport components that are integrated in the cell membrane. A second part of the project focuses on identifying those genes that are activated during temperature stress and that coordinate auxin transport in different root cells.
The project from Ewa Mellerowicz, who is professor at the Department of Forest Genetics and Plant Physiology at SLU, is based on a recent finding that she and her group made. They found so far unnoticed lipidic compounds in the cell walls of wood and want now to characterize these compounds further. They want to investigate which role these compounds play in the wood cell walls, how they are synthesized and to develop methods to efficiently extract them. Their hope is that this knowledge will help to reduce damages to the machinery in biorefineries that are caused by such lipidic compounds but also develop new products derived from wood like for example natural waxes or environmentally friendly packaging.
The applied project that was granted by Formas, the Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development, comprises several partners from industry and academia and is designed in partnership with the municipality in Boden, in Northern Sweden. The goal is to improve energy fluxes in a large-scale symbiosis project, called the Boden Symbiosis Cluster, by using artificial intelligence. Energy, in form of heat and low-heat waters, that is released from server halls and other local industries shall be channelled into an aqua-agro farming system to establish a sustainable food production site.
Olivier Keech, associate professor at the Department of Plant Physiology at Umeå University, will focus on the plant components of the project while his colleagues from Luleå University of Technology (LTU) and Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences will concentrate more on microbial and animal production systems. Together with the division of Machine Learning at LTU, they will integrate the different energy flows using artificial intelligence to improve sustainability and cost-efficiency. They hope to create an urban food competence platform of commercial size that can be used for implementing and testing innovative solutions for future food production systems.
The four projects approved by the Swedish Research Council within Natural and Engineering Sciences:
• How do trees survive winter?
Stefan Jansson
Umeå Plant Science Centre
Department of Plant Physiology
Umeå University
Email:
https://www.upsc.se/stefan_jansson
• Cell type and organelle specificity in cytokinin and auxin signalling and metabolism during Arabidopsis lateral root initiation
Karin Ljung
Umeå Plant Science Centre
Department of Forest Genetics and Plant Physiology
Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
Email:
https://www.upsc.se/karin_ljung
• How plants deal with heat and cold: molecular mechanism of auxin transport in response to temperature stress
Petra Marhava
Umeå Plant Science Centre
Department of Forest Genetics and Plant Physiology
Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
Email:
• Wood suberin? Unravelling biosynthesis and chemical structure of wood lipophilic compounds
Ewa Mellerowicz
Umeå Plant Science Centre
Department of Forest Genetics and Plant Physiology
Umeå University
Email:
https://www.upsc.se/ewa_mellerowicz
The Formas project in the call on “From research to implementation for a sustainable society”
• AI for improved efficiency and sustainability of closed land-based integrated food production Systems – a case study in Boden project – iCFPS (intelligent Circular Food production Systems)
Olivier Keech
Umeå Plant Science Centre
Department of Plant Physiology
Umeå University
Email:
https://www.upsc.se/olivier_keech