Christiane Funk top left (photo: Thomas Kieselbach), Peter Marhavy top middle (photo: Petra Marhava), Totte Niittylä top right (photo: unknown), Markus Schmid bottom left (photo: Natuschka Lee), Nathaniel Street bottom right (photo: Mattias Pettersson)
Five projects that are affiliated with UPSC were granted by the Swedish Research Council last week. The project leaders Christiane Funk, Totte Niittylä, Markus Schmid and Nathaniel Street received a project grant and Peter Marhavy, who is planning to join UPSC in spring 2020, was awarded a starting grant to establish his research group at UPSC.
Christiane Funk, professor at the Department of Chemistry at Umeå University and associated group leader at UPSC, focuses in her research on protein degrading enzymes and on microalgae and their potential use for cleaning wastewater and biomass production. The current project aims to understand and characterize the mechanisms behind programmed cell death in single cell organisms like microalgae. The focus will be on the role of a certain group of protein degrading enzymes called metacaspases and how those have developed during evolution.
Peter Marhavy, who currently works as a postdoc in Niko Geldner’s group at the University of Lausanne, will use the funding from VR to study early defence responses in plants induced by wounding. With the help of a laser he plans to artificially induce wounding and then identify and characterize the genes and proteins that are involved in the following early defence responses. A special focus will be on the intracellular organization and the cell-wall integrity that are both affected by the wounding.
The project from Totte Niittylä who is associate professor at the Department of Forest Genetics and Plant Physiology at SLU and group leader at UPSC will concentrate on the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. His group works on plant cell walls, and on identifying essential genes indispensable for the function of a plant cell. This project follows the groups recent discovery of an evolutionary conserved gene of unknown function that is essential for processes in the nuclear envelope and mitochondria in dividing plant cells. These processes are so far uncharacterized and the purpose of the new project is to investigate their mechanism and function.
Markus Schmid, professor at the Department of Plant Physiology at Umeå University and group leader at UPSC, wants to understand the mechanisms that control flowering time in plants. The current project will focus on a specific DNA-binding protein that regulates the activation of genes, the transcription factor FD. The aim is to find proteins that guide this transcription factor to the right DNA sequence and activate the target gene and to get a better insight in how this mechanism has evolved.
The aim of Nathaniel Street’s project is to explore how the giant genome of Norway spruce is organised and changes during development. The genomes of conifer species are almost entirely made up of regions that do not encode genes, with genes existing in a vast ocean of non-coding DNA. Nathanial Street, who is associate professor at the Department of Plant Physiology at Umeå University and group leader at UPSC, wants to understand the function of these non-coding DNA regions and how genes are physically organised by analysing the three-dimensional structure of the DNA and how these changes during development. This will be done with the help of advanced sequencing methods.
The projects and contact information of the project leaders:
- Project: Live and let die! - The involvement of metacaspase-homologues in programmed cell death of photosynthetic microorganisms
Christiane Funk
Department of Chemistry
Umeå University
Email:
https://www.umu.se/en/staff/christiane-funk/?expandaccordion=b
- Project: Electrical signal – The secret way of cell-to-cell communication
Peter Marharvy
Department of Plant Molecular Biology (DBMV)
University of Lausanne
Email:
- Project: The unknown unknowns of plant cell biology
Totte Niittylä
Umeå Plant Science Centre
Department of Forest Genetics and Plant Physiology
Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
Email:
www.upsc.se/totte_niittyla
- Project: Binding of Arabidopsis FD to an Unusual cis-Regulatory Element – A new Role for the Master Floral Regulator LEAFY?
Markus Schmid
Umeå Plant Science Centre
Department of Plant Physiology
Umeå University
Email:
www.upsc.se/markus_schmid
- Project: Chromatin dynamics in the gigantic genome of Norway spruce
Nathaniel Street
Umeå Plant Science Centre
Department of Plant Physiology
Umeå University
Email:
www.upsc.se/nathaniel_street