My poster at the Euro Evo Devo meeting in Paris was awarded a Student Poster Prize!

Research interests

I am interested in a wide range of research subjects within the general fields of plant biology, developmental biology, molecular biology and evolutionary biology, and more often than not the really interesting questions in my opinion arise in the intersection between fields that are traditionally considered to be distinct.

I am interested in how the plant life cycle and the development of the plant body has evolved through plant evolution, particularly in non-flowering plants, in other words gymnosperms, seedless vascular plants and bryophytes, as well as in the early flowering plants.

I am interested in the regulatory mechanisms involved in the formation and maintainance of primary and secondary meristems in different kinds of plants as well as in the regulatory mechanisms involved in cell/tissue/organ identity specification, cell differentiation and cell-to-cell communication.

I am also interested in the application of (molecular) plant biology in agriculture, forestry and horticulture.

Research for my PhD thesis: Functional Diversification among MADS-box genes and the Evolution of Conifer Seed Cone Development (LINK to my thesis)

Supervisors: Peter Engström and Karolina Tandre 

In my PhD thesis I have used a comparative developmental-genetics approach to study the development and evolution of conifer seed cones in Pinaceae, Cupressaceae and Taxodiaceae, with the specific aim of testing the hypotheses of Florin from 1951 on the identity of the female reproductive organ, the ovuliferous scale, in seed cones of these families. I have further studied the origin and functional evolution of the AGAMOUS subfamily of MADS-box genes in conifers and flowering plants, a gene family of particular importance for the reproductive development in seed plants. I have also studied the functional evolution of AGL6 subfamily genes, another group of MADS-box genes important for reproductive development in seed plants. During this work I have used the conifer Norway spruce (Picea abies) and the angiosperm Thale cress (Arabidopsis thaliana) as my two main model organisms, but I have also isolated, and functionally characterized by expression analyses, new genes from a number of other conifer species. In addition to the plant model species I have also worked with yeast in comparative analyses of protein dimerization properties of various plant proteins using the yeast-2-hybrid technology.