Biochemical Journal Poster Prize winner

Monika Mortensen

After completing a BSc in Biology at Imperial College London and an MSc in Integrated Immunology at the University of Oxford, Monika Mortensen started her PhD in October 2006 at the University of Oxford, which she completed earlier this year. Her PhD consisted on studying the role of autophagy in the haematopoietic system in vivo. Autophagy takes place in the cytoplasm of all eukaryotic cells and involves the formation of a double-membraned vesicle, the autophagosome, which sequesters cytoplasmic cargo and delivers it to the lysosomes for degradation. As autophagy gene knockout mice are neonatally lethal, I used a conditional knockout approach to obtain mice lacking the essential autophagy gene Atg7 in the haematopoietic system only. The most striking phenotype of these mice being that they develop a severe anaemia, they discovered that autophagy is essential for red blood cell development. Autophagy has indeed now been shown, by them and others, to be essential for the removal of mitochondria from developing erythrocytes. At the "Autophagy: from molecules to disease" conference, she presented her most recent work describing the importance of autophagy for the maintenance of haematopoietic stem cells and the prevention of leukaemia in mice.