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Torgny Näsholm is awarded the 2018 Marcus Wallenberg Prize. Photo: Johan Marklund
Torgny Näsholm discovered that amino acids play an important role as nitrogen source for plants. He receives now the Marcus Wallenberg Prize 2018 for his ground-breaking research.
Please have a look on the Marcus Wallenberg Foundation homepage for more information:
http://mwp.org/new-kinds-of-fertilizers-for-a-sustainable-forestry/
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Photo: Kathryn Robinson
The plant geneticist and lecturer at the Department of Plant Physiology, Nathaniel Street, is awarded the pedagogical prize from the Faculty of Science and Technology. The prize jury motivated its decision due to his outstanding ambition, good organization and strong interest in developing new ways of teaching. Nathaniel Street will receive the prize during the Spring graduation ceremony of Umeå University on the 19th of May.
“I was on the Ski lift and checked my emails when I found out that I was awarded for the prize”, tells Nathaniel Street. “I was so surprised that I had to read the message twice to be sure that it was true. It is fantastic to know that the efforts made for teaching are acknowledged and appreciated. I really did not expect this, especially because there are so many other excellent teachers in our institute.”
Nathaniel Street came as a postdoc to Umeå University in 2007. In 2011, he became Assistant Professor and is since January 2016 Associate Professor at the Department of Plant Physiology.
During his time at Umeå University, he has fast developed his teaching skills further. He became the course leader of the department’s genomics courses in 2011 and has refined the course since then. Nathaniel Street is also teaching on the courses Bioinformatics and Genome Analysis and Microbiology and Basic Molecular Biology at Umeå University as well as the course Plant Biology for Future Forestry at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU).
The prize motivation emphasizes Nathaniel Street’s extremely careful preparation of his teaching. He gives well prepared and clear lectures that are greatly appreciated by the students and he is continuously improving his teaching methods. Among others, he has introduced interactive and student-led discussions, new practical classes in the lab and discussions on ethics. Several of these initiatives have subsequently been taken over by other teachers at the institution.
“He involves both his own research group and the bioinformatics platform at the Umeå Plant Science Centre in his work and successfully creates extremely smooth ways of teaching, that not only allow the students to get in contact with actual research, but are also very interesting for the research itself”, is stated in the prize motivation. “His high competence in both plant biology and genetics as well as in advanced computing has made this possible.”
Nathanial Street focuses his research on finding the genes that control natural variation and he is analysing microbial communities that are living close together with forest trees. His ambition is to combine his research interest with his educational ambition and strong willingness to develop his teaching methods further.
“My hope is to convey my own fascination and interest in my research area. It can be a challenging area to teach because it is changing very fast, but I try to keep the courses up to date. I do not want the students to just sit and listen to me. It is fun to think of new ways to motivate the students to learn together and from each other and to help them develop skills to learn independently in the future. The courses I have attended at the University Education and Teacher Support (UPL) have been a great inspiration for this.”
Link to the Swedish press release
For more information, please contact:
Nathaniel Street
Associate Professor
Umeå Plant Science Centre
Department of Plant Physiology
Umeå University
Phone: 090-786 54 73
E-mail:
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Bud from the model organism hybrid aspen (Populus tremula x Populus tremuloides); Photo: Pal Miskolczi
For trees in boreal and temperate climates, it is important that buds do not burst precociously, but only when it's spring for real. Therefore, the buds are put in dormancy in the autumn, which means they have to go through a long cold period before they slowly become susceptible to the signals of spring. The mechanism behind this is revealed in a new study led by Rishi Bhalerao from UPSC, recently published in the journal Science.
Trees are amongst the longest-living organisms on Earth, and some species can live for thousands of years. One of the key mechanisms that enable such a long life is their synchronization of growth with change in seasons. For example, in temperate and boreal ecosystems, trees stop their growth and establish dormancy prior to the advent of winter. Growth cessation and dormancy establishment is a key adaptive mechanism for winter survival, since failure to cease growth and establish dormancy can result in fatality from extreme low temperatures in the winter.
How trees know when to stop their growth and establish dormancy is a question that has been of interest to researchers since a long time. That growth stops in response to the decrease in daylight during autumn has been well understood. The establishment of dormancy, which means that buds cannot burst before they have experienced a long cold period, and are not awakened by short warm periods during winter, has been more of a mystery. The recent article in Science, however, provides an important insight into how winter dormancy is regulated in perennial trees.
What the researchers could show is that the so-called plasmodesmata, channels that connect different cells with each other, are closed by the deposition of callose, a polysaccharide, in response to the shortening of day length in the autumn. The blockage of the plasmodesmata prevents cells from receiving growth promotive signals, thereby maintaining growth arrest and establishing dormancy in the buds.
The researchers also show that short-day induced dormancy is regulated by the plant hormone abscisic acid which activates (among others) the production of the callose that is used to block the plasmodesmata. Once blocked, a long exposure to low temperatures is needed to slowly re-open the plasmodesmata again, so that the growth-inducing signals can reach the buds and stimulate the growth in the buds in the spring.
"Interestingly, some of the facets of the dormancy regulation mechanism described in our paper have been observed in winter wheat as well as characean algae, suggesting that this mechanism is probably ancient and evolutionarily conserved", says Rishikesh Bhalerao.
The study was conducted using hybrid aspen, which is a model plant in tree research.
The study has been conducted by a research team led by Rishi Bhalerao from SLU's Department of Forest Genetics and Plant Physiology and the Umeå Plant Science Center. The colleagues come from SLU in Alnarp, Uppsala University, University of Helsinki, Cambridge University, Monash University and the University of Environmental and Life Sciences in Norway.
Link to the Swedish press release on the SLU homepage
More information
Contact person
Rishikesh P. Bhalerao, Professor
Umeå Plant Science Centre
Department of Forest Genetics and Plant Physiology
Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Umeå
+46 (0)90-786 84 88, +46 (0)70-678 37 32,
The article
S. Tylewicz, A. Petterle, S. Marttila, P. Miskolczi, A. Azeez, R. K. Singh, J. Immanen, N. Mähler, T. R. Hvidsten, D. M. Eklund, J. L. Bowman, Y. Helariutta, R. P. Bhalerao. 2018. Photoperiodic control of seasonal growth is mediated by ABA acting on cell-cell communication. Science 10.1126/science.aan8576 (2018).
DOI: 10.1126/science.aan8576
Direct link to the article in Science
Text: David Stephansson (SLU)
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Mateusz Majda and his opponent Malcolm Bennett from the University of Nottingham. Photo: Stéphanie Robert If you are interested in reading more about Mateusz Majda's findings, have a look here: https://www.upsc.se/about-upsc/news/5235-the-growth-of-puzzle-piece-shaped-leaf-cells-gets-an-explanation.html
Link to the doctoral thesis: https://pub.epsilon.slu.se/15263/