EMBO fellow in the lab of Staffan Persson at Copenhagen University

Plant physiology and morphology are dependent on a multitude of different specialised cell types. All of them are surrounded by a cell wall, which functions both as an exoskeleton for each individual cell and a cohesive interface between them, giving rise to tissues and organs. In my PhD with Edouard Pesquet I dug into the redundancies and specificities of the lignification machinery. Disentangling the functions of five Laccase paralogs — the enzymes catalysing the polymerisation of lignin in the cell wall — we provided evidence for substrate- and cell wall layer-specific functions of the different enzymes. Additionally, we found that the specific differences in the lignin composition of different cell types and cell wall layers were crucial for the respective cell functions, providing the beginning of an explanation for the enormous chemical diversity of lignin.

For my PostDoc I moved to Staffan Persson's lab in Copenhagen, working in close collaboration with Jürgen Kleine-Vehn in Freiburg. My project aims to understand the feedback mechanisms between cell wall integrity sensing by receptor-like kinases and primary cell wall biosynthesis. One hypothesis that emerged from preliminary data of the Kleine-Vehn lab unsurprisingly involves Feronia and its interaction with the cellulose synthase complex. In parallel, I am starting up a CRISPR-based forward genetic screen to identify cell wall sensing components that have previously been hidden by gentic redundancy.

When I am not working to understand their inner workings, I spend as much of my time as possible hiking, climbing and canoeing among plants.