What is up Marie? – Success and challenges on the path to becoming a virus doctor

Marie Peters is is a PhD student at the Department of Clinical Microbiology at Umeå university.

ImageEmma Honkala

my excitement may have been heard in most of the department

How does it feel?

“It was an incredible feeling to have the printed version of my thesis, as so many years have gone into this work. I excitedly waited by the door to receive the delivery and my excitement may have been heard in most of the department!”

What has been rewarding in being a PhD?

“The nicest thing about being a PhD student was to be able to follow a project the whole way from beginning to end and being able to perform new experiments depending on the different findings. I also think this was a great experience thanks to the support of my main supervisor Anna Överby and co-supervisors Richard Lundmark and Emma Nilsson. They guided me through the process and invested a lot on time on helping me get to where I am. As a PhD I also had the opportunity to go to different international conferences, including American Society for Virology in Columbus, Ohio, and also European congress in virology in Gdansk, Poland, that were very fun and allowed me to connect with different people in my field.

What have you been struggling with?

“A challenge has been the struggle of doing experiments, as only approximately 50 percent of the experiments were actually successful, which can sometimes be very frustrating . As a fun example I have managed to completely evaporate an agarose gel on accident trying to optimize an assay.”

What do you plan to do after your dissertation?

“When I have defended my Doctoral thesis, I have the great plan of taking a vacation in which I will watch reality TV shows to give my brain a break from all the thinking and hard work!”

“Thereafter, I will continue in Anna Överby’s Lab for a couple of months to finish some of the projects I am part of. More long term, I am planning on staying in academia and pursuing a postdoc, where I will hopefully be able to apply the knowledge I have gained during my PhD.

What is the research about and your main result?

“Like all viruses, orthoflaviviruses have their own proteins, but they also hijack proteins from host cells to survive and multiply. While some of these proteins have been identified, many remain unknown. For this reason, the focus of my PhD thesis was to identify and characterize some of these proteins to in the future be able to use this knowledge for the development of antivirals (as little or no antivirals are available against most orthoflaviviruses).”

“I worked a lot with understanding the role of Nucleoporins (NUPs) in orthoflavivirus infection. They are a really cool group of proteins that in cells build up the nuclear pore complex that is involved in the transport of RNA and proteins across the nuclear envelope. While their cellular functions are well characterized, their role in orthoflavivirus infection is understudied. With the work I present in my thesis I show that these proteins are indeed important in infection in particular for the replication and translation stages of the viral life cycle.”

Read about Marie Peter's dissertation event