Time to celebrate: The Cell Wall Dynamics group gets major grant!

We are thrilled to share that the Green Cell Wall Dynamics Lab has been awarded a Novo Nordisk Foundation Emerging Investigator Grant for our project DYNAMO: Dynamics of Mechanochemical Signals in Plant Cell Walls. The grant amounts to DKK 12.5 million (around €1.7 million) over five years and is part of the Foundation's programme supporting promising research leaders within plant science, agriculture, and food biotechnology across the Nordic countries.

This is wonderful news, and while my name is on the application, this grant is a recognition of the entire team. Science is never a solo effort. Every experiment that shaped this proposal, every discussion that sharpened the ideas, every result that gave us the confidence to push further, that was all of us. I am incredibly grateful to work alongside people who bring curiosity, rigour, and dedication to the lab every day. This would simply not have been possible without the team behind me, and I want that to be said clearly.

What is DYNAMO about?

Plants face a fundamental tension: they need to grow fast, but they also need to be structurally sound. This growth–stability trade-off is not just a biological curiosity, it has real implications for agriculture and forestry, where rapid growth and robust structure are both desirable but often seem to work against each other.

DYNAMO will investigate whether the chemical and mechanical changes that happen in plant cell walls as cells expand can themselves act as signals: cues that tell a cell when to stop growing and start building stronger tissue. We will work with two systems: Arabidopsis thaliana, our trusty genetic model, and hybrid aspen, which brings the work closer to real-world forestry applications. By tracking early wall responses and how signals spread to neighbouring cells, we aim to build computational models that link wall state to developmental decisions, and ultimately, to test whether these models can help predict which crop and tree lines will strike the best balance between growth and stability.

Looking ahead

We have been building tools, methods, and questions around mechanochemical signalling in the cell wall for a while now, and this grant gives us the space and resources to pursue those cues with much more detail and rigour. There is a lot we want to understand, and we are genuinely excited to dig in.

Thanks to the Novo Nordisk Foundation for this trust, to Umeå University and Umeå Plant Science Centre for their continued support, and above all: thank you to the lab. Let's get to work.

Positions at different levels (PhD student and postdoctoral researcher) will be announced in connection with this grant in 2026, 2027 and 2029.