Stefan Jansson (top left; photo: Fredrik Larsson), Karin Ljung (top middle; photo: Fredrik Larsson), Petra Marhava (bottom left; photo: Peter Marhavy), Ewa Mellerowicz (bottom middle) and Olivier Keech (right; photo: Fredrik Larsson)
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