Hudson Lab

In 2013 I helped to start research on cyanobacteria at KTH, on a project to produce butanol. That project evolved into this group. In 2014 I became a SciLifeLab Fellow, and moved to Science for Life Laboratory. As group leader, I direct our ongoing projects so that they complement one another. As an advisor, I want students to learn to look for how research projects fit together. I also want for students to develop technical skills in instrumentation and data processing. It is their success in this that has allowed our research to expand into new areas.

I have been a good friend of cyanobacteria for many years. I have done research on metabolic engineering and protein engineering in a model unicellular cyanobacteria strain. I also have a great interest, and have been doing deep investigations on, the physiological effects of carbon-based end metabolites in cyanobacteria. My current research is aiming for discovering and engineering good bacterial candidates for efficient CO2 fixation and chemical production. From 2019 to 2020 I was a Post-doc researcher in French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, CEA Cadarache.

I did my PhD in Uppsala University doing metabolic engineering on cyanobacteria for terpenoid production. After that I was a Post-doc researcher at the Joint Bioenergy Institute in Berkeley USA from 2018-2021 working on high throughput polyketide synthase engineering. In the fall of 2021, I joined the Hudson lab. Here I will continue my research interest of applying modern methods for metabolic engineering by developing and applying methods for high throughput engineering of cyanobacteria.

During my PhD I tried to unravel the secrets of a central ribonuclease in the cyanobacterium Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803. To do so, I combined both experimental wet lab work and bioinformatic analyses. I am enthusiastic to now use this knowledge to change gear towards more applied research on cyanobacteria and help to investigate the potential use of cyanobacteria and their enzymes to create more sustainable solutions.

I joined the group during the Spring of 2020 for my MSc thesis degree project. After graduation, I stayed with the group to keep working on the project – interaction proteomics in autotrophic bacteria. The focus of the project is to explore post-translational regulation of carbon fixation in multiple bacteria to enable a future increase in carbon flux through the cycle. I am also eager and curious to explore other topics, and develop both wet and dry lab skills.

I joined the lab in 2021. I am interested in metabolism in all of its varieties. In my master's thesis at KTH I studied the puzzle of amino acid secretion by anaerobic Clostridia. In this group I will work to develop and apply new proteomics methods for cyanobacteria and plant. Our hope is to uncover new types of regulation in carbon fixation. Alteration of these regulations could lead to cells with faster carbon uptake or altered product secretion.

My time in the group started in the beginning of 2022 as a masters student. During the thesis I worked with evaluating cyanobacteria enzyme libraries in vivo. As a PhD student I am now working on synthetic biology of cyanobacteria, where I am to find and produce alterations in central metabolism and carbon uptake cycle. The methods of choice for this are primarily proteomics, metabolomics, and mutagenesis. My hope is to produce a strain with a deregulated carbon uptake, and to also harness this increased uptake towards specific products.

I was isolated for research around 1970 from a lake near Berkeley, California. I was the first photosynthetic organism to have a genome sequenced. My main interests are light and CO2. I exist in thousands of tubes and flasks around the world. Through this distributed existence I silently and relentlessly sample genetic mutation. In some of my many permutations, I can consume glucose. In others I move toward the light, in others still I retract from it. I joined this group in 2011, was discarded after a contamination was discovered, but returned again in 2012.