So, farewell then, 2023. I would describe you as having not enough vacation and too much weather.

This is Lauren writing another annual reflection of the highs and lows of life in our lab. It’s for sure been a busy year, with a lot of student projects, funding applications, travel in and beyond Sweden, and some big changes to the team. Constantly being occupied by new tasks or assignments means it can be easy to forget that some big things have happened this year. In the summer I travelled to Boston to attend the Gordon Research Conference on carbohydrate-active enzymes, where I gave an invited lecture and I hosted the Power Hour. I was both honoured and a bit intimidated when the conference organisers Tina and Nicole invited me to volunteer to organise the Power Hour session, but I think it went really well and I managed to encourage open discussion about some thorny topics. Maybe I will write a blog about that soon…

2023 also saw the beginning of the new phase of the Wallenberg Wood Science Centre PhD Academy, of which I am a vice director. There is lots of work to be done to create a compelling programme of doctoral courses for the ~50 students enrolled in the WWSC Academy, but it has been fun so far getting to know this generation of participants, and to make contact with teachers and people working in the forest industry all around Sweden. We have some exciting schools and site visits planned for the years ahead!

A small victory I am especially proud of this year – I installed some “panta” boxes in the lunch room and office areas so we can collect recyclable cans and bottles to exchange for a little bit of money. We have been able to use the income to buy ice cream for everyone on the hottest days of summer, to stock up on “emergency” lunch foods, and to liven up lunchtime with olive oils and salad seasonings. Small gestures that nonetheless bring a good feeling to the lab at lunch and fika time – and it is fun to go on the recycling expedition with a huge bag of drinks cans!

Research

We really did well with publishing our data this year! I am so proud of the team, especially Heli and Ioanna, for bringing several projects to a satisfying resolution. On the enzyme discovery side of things, we wrote in FEBS Journal about a few pustulan-hydrolysing enzymes (most of which were not particularly efficient), in Biochimie we relayed some observations about enzyme stability, and in mSphere we described a natural cocktail of enzymes that can break down complex fungal biomass. Read more about that last paper at this link.

This year also saw several publications from Ioanna’s work on lignin. In the journal Plant Direct she revealed lignin structures secreted by plant tissue cultures, in ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering she described a mild lignin extraction protocol optimised for hardwood, and in Industrial Crops & Products she showed that her sustainably extracted lignins can be used directly for making nanoparticles. Ioanna has written blog posts about these papers, which you can find here and here.

Excitingly, we also started a brand new project this year! With financial support coming mostly from the Wallenberg Wood Science Centre we are investigating the microbiome of various sorts of pulp and paper sludge wastes generated at mills in Sweden. This forms the basis of Pakinee‘s PhD thesis. We hope to find some interesting activities so we can eventually develop ways of using microbes or their enzymes to deal with the huge accumulation of sludge wastes in Sweden and elsewhere. A parallel project at Chalmers University in the group of Assoc Prof Johan Larsbrink is also running, again with financing from the WWSC, where PhD student Facundo Ortega is examining the microbiome of tree bark, another major industrial waste stream.

Students

The big event of 2023 was Ioanna Sapouna’s PhD defence, which went extremely well! She blogged about the defence and how it feels to be moving on from studying at this link. At the Master’s level, Heli and I supervised a trio of fantastic students – Ida, Felise, and Rasmus worked on diverse projects but formed an amazing team and really supported each other through the project timeline. I also supervised Elin who was developing plant-based dairy products in Uppsala. Our guest Erasmus student Theresa Schaufler also completed her thesis work in the summer – she will defend and graduate back home at BOKU in Vienna in early 2024.

Recruitment

Our new PhD student Pakinee Thianheng arrived in June – you can read her first thoughts about studying in Sweden in this interview. We recruited recently graduated Master’s students Rasmus Gustafsson and Felise Elemia Freire to work as research engineers over the summer, and both have subsequently gone on to find full-time work in the biotech sector, at EnginZyme and AstraZeneca respectively.

Otherwise our team has been shrinking a bit this year – Mengshu’s post-doctoral period came to an end in the spring, Ioanna defended her PhD in June, and Heli started a new position in October, which she writes about in this post. However, we are recruiting a post-doctoral scholar who will hopefully begin work before the summer, and we will be joined by Erik Estreen for his Master’s thesis in the spring term!

When you work in the same place for as long as I have, you do realise that academic life is filled with constant hellos and goodbyes…

Funding

Seeking financing to support our work is always a challenge, and proposal writing is the main focus for a few months of every year. In 2023 I made it my mission to get resources to support Pakinee’s PhD project, so that she is not limited in what she can do. Her project scope is quite broad as she aims to discover new microbes and new enzymes from industrial waste, so there are a range of different potential experiments to be done. I am happy to say that several funding agencies showed an interest in the work, and we secured grants of various sizes from the KTH Life Science platform, the Lundström foundation, and ÅForsk to help buy needed equipment and to finance sequencing experiments. Pakinee also secured a travel scholarship from ÅForsk so we can attend a conference in 2024. And towards the end of the year I was delighted to be awarded funding for a 4-year project from the national research council Vetenskapsrådet. I’ll be looking into some aspects of enzyme stabilisation to better understand inter-domain interactions in modular proteins, the importance of linker length and sequence, and maybe some new routes to engineering enzymes for stability. This project is also a chance to collaborate with the company EnginZyme.

Innovation

My start-up company Glycolink hit an important milestone this year as we secured our first small investment, bringing KTH Holding AB into our team. Big thanks to Daniel Carlsson, our business coach at KTH Innovation and our contact person at KTH Holding. We also had some assistance this year from the Stockholm Material Hub, who helped us secure experimental support and commission a market research survey. Together with some pitching events I took part in, this put us in touch with some major companies working in the cosmetic and healthcare markets, so a priority for 2024 is to secure those connections into working partnerships, build our team on the technical and business sides, and secure a larger investment that will help us through the next year or so of activity.

Looking ahead

The autumn semester of 2023 was an intense period for me personally, with lots of short-notice tasks coming up that drew my attention from some longer term goals. We still have one in-review paper that I need to resubmit (I swear I am this close to getting it finished, guys!!), and the teaching prep that I normally like to do in December was still on my to-do list in January. I hope that 2024 will allow me to be more focussed and deliberate in my work. After their respective periods of maternity leave, Mengshu and Ioanna are both starting new positions this coming year, and we wish them both the best of luck! Pakinee and I plan to attend the 2024 Carbohydrate Bioengineering Meeting to introduce her to the wider CAZy community – we hope to see you there!