PEOPLE IN THE LAB
Thomas Nyström
Professor, Principal Investigator
Thomas received his PhD in Microbiology at the University of Gothenburg in 1989 under the supervision of Staffan Kjelleberg working on the topic of how bacteria survive a conditionally induced, growth-arrested, G0–like state. He continued studying this topic under the mentorship of Frederick C. Neidhardt at the University of Michigan, as a postdoctoral fellow. With Fred, he discovered, cloned, and characterized the gene/protein called the Universal Stress Protein A (UspA). Upon returning to Sweden, as an Assistant Professor at Lund University, he demonstrated that the global re-routing of the transcriptional apparatus during cellular growth arrest was governed by a trade-off mechanism, now called sigma factor competition. His work on a bacterial G0-like state also lead to the discovery that aberrant and slightly misfolded proteins are more susceptible to attack by reactive oxygen species, which pinpointed an up-till-then unknown pathway for protein oxidation and established E. coli as a model system for studying the mechanisms underlying oxidative attack to proteins in the context of chronological cellular aging. Upon expanding the studies of protein oxidation to other model systems, the laboratory discovered that oxidatively damage proteins are inherited in a asymmetrical fashion in S. cerevisiae - Specifically, damaged proteins are retained in old mother cells during cytokinesis allowing proteomic age characteristics to be reset in the cellular progeny. Thomas is a Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Class VI, the American Academy of Microbiology, the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, and EMBO.
Xinxin Hao
Technical Assistant
Xinxin is a technician in the TN lab since 2009, and has been involved in establishing a novel high-content imaging based screening approach in the group. She is involved in most of the ongoing projects in the group by providing her experimental expertise, and she also works on updating and maintaining good protocols for the various genome-wide screening techniques used in the lab.
Srishti Chawla
Post-Doc
Srishti did her PhD in Prof. Alok Mondal's lab at CSIR-Institute of Microbial Technology-Jawahar lal Nehru University in India. Her doctoral thesis is about molecular genetics and structure functional significance of Serine threonine phophatases from a halotolerant yeast Debaryomyces hansenii. She then studied calcium streaming in pathogenic Candida albicans utilizing GECIs at University of Aberdeen, Scotland with Dr Alexandra Brand's group. She also worked on how obesity influences aging in yeast and generating Biofuels from arrested yeast cells was a part of her work in Florida International University, USA. Besides this she is also working on a collaborative project with Prof. P.K Pati from Guru Nanak Dev University-Amritsar India. This project is about molecular genetic characterization of a halotolerant QTL from Oryza sativa, in budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Currently, she is interested in calcium dynamics during Proteostasis and how calcium effects PQC machinery and aggregate formation during aging in yeast.
Per Widlund
Researcher
Per did his PhD with Prof. Trisha Davis at the University of Washington in Seattle, WA, USA studying cell division and chromosome segregation. He moved on to a Post-Doc with Director Tony Hyman at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, Germany where he worked on regulation of microtubule dynamics. Currently, he is working on the role of membrane trafficking in aggregate inclusion formation.
TN LAB ALUMNI
The Nyström group in April of 2019.