MOSS 2004 Poster Award Winner: Tina Olsson

I got my Master of Science with a major in biology in 2000 and started as a Ph.D student in Hans Ronne’s group the same year. I will finish my Ph.D. the fall of 2005, in the field of Molecular Genetics. Our work in Physcomitrella focuses on carbon and energy metabolism, and I am primarily studying the enzyme hexokinase, which apart from its role in primary carbon metabolism also has been implicated in sugar sensing and signaling both in plants and in yeast.

I never really intended to work with moss, or even plants. As a graduate student I was in the field of microbiology and fully intended to continue as a post graduate student in the same field studying virulence factors in prokaryotes. But first I wanted to learn more about eukaryotic systems so I contacted Hans Ronne, which I knew worked with yeast, to ask if I could work in his lab as a project student. He was very positive and told me that I was certainly welcome to work in one of the yeast projects going on at the moment, but otherwise he and his Ph.D student Mattias Thelander had just started setting up this new moss system.
I, of course, got interested in Physco and once I finished the project I could not bear to give it up, so I stayed in Hans’ group as the new Physco Ph.D. student, forgetting all about my once so dear prokaryotes. Now a few years later I have realised that plants are much more interesting than I had ever imagined, and that Physcomitrella indeed is a very powerful model system when working in molecular genetics: haploid stage in the life cycle, homologous recombination events and so on. The fact that the moss genome is being sequenced is of course an advantage too.

After I finish my Ph.D., I hope to find an interesting post-doc position. Since there still is a year to go, I have not really decided in what field or which organism I would like to continue with, but I am kind of leaning towards the Physcomitrella direction. Especially with the Genome sequenced and not the least the open moss community and our nice moss meetings. The moss meetings has always been a great help for me in both giving me insights in the moss research going on and giving me new ideas on how to continue in my own research project. The openness and helpfulness of the moss community is a great advantage and something that I think we should try to hold on to.