Laura Arribas-Hernandez was the first to discover that plants use different proteins of the type Evolutionary Conserved C-Terminus (ECT) to accelerate their growth. She started off as a PhD student in 2014, and in 2017 Laura Arribas-Hernandez was able to provide definitive evidence of her discovery.

Laura Arribas-Hernandez came to the University of Copenhagen for the first time from Spain in August 2010. She was an exchange student at the time and completed a one-year master’s thesis project in January 2011.

As early as April of the same year, she was employed at the Department of Biology (Bioinformatics and RNA Biology) as a PhD student with Professor Peter Brodersen. He had spotted that Laura Arribas-Hernandez was a talented student and had offered her the position. The two still work together.

It was not set in stone that Laura Arribas-Hernandez would become a researcher.

I’m very fascinated by how smart plants are, it’s incredible

Assistant professor Laura Arribas-Hernandez

She was born in Madrid. The family was not wealthy, so her parents wanted her to become an engineer so she could secure herself financially. They did not consider a research career to be attractive, and unemployment was previously very high in Spain.

So Laura Arribas-Hernandez had graduated as a communication engineer in 1996, and over time she landed a good job video editing for the Spanish public broadcasting media group TVE.

As most of her work was in the evening, she started studying biology in 2003 at Spain’s largest university, the Universidad Complutense in Madrid, from where she received her master’s degree in biology in 2011 – 19 years after finishing secondary school.

»I originally just wanted to go to Copenhagen to improve my English, but I was older than the others and had an inferiority complex, because in the beginning I thought that everyone was better than me. But I eventually discovered that I’m just as good as them, and I got my confidence back,« says Laura Arribas-Hernandez.

Things moved on quickly from then on, and she is now employed as an assistant professor and is about to start her own research group.

Laura Arribas-Hernandez has been selected as a so-called Sapere Aude research director with a grant of DKK 6 million from the Independent Research Fund Denmark for her research project, SPROUT, which aims to bring stem cells to life in dormant plant buds using RNA code.

»I’m very proud of this grant, because I came to Denmark 15 years ago with an inferiority complex, and now I’ve got this important award,« she says.

The project will last for four years, and she is now working on setting up the laboratory and hiring people for her research group, which has not yet been named. She hopes the project will show how one out of 11 proteins, ECT8, regulates plant growth.

»ECT8 is important for all plants. The protein in effect makes plants smart, so they can wake up and start to set branches if there is a change in temperature, if the top of a tree is cut, or if the light changes,« says Arribas-Hernandez.

The discovery is not only of interest in terms of basic science, but could also be a major economic boon if it becomes possible to control when plants come out of dormancy. The yield of crops in the world’s fields depends on their branching pattern – which in turn depends on the dormancy and growth of the buds.

Laura Arribas-Hernandez has always been fascinated by the growth of plants, and she sometimes feels that they get too little attention relative to animals.

»I’m very fascinated by how smart plants are, it’s incredible,« she says.

When Laura Arribas-Hernandez is not in the laboratory, she can often be found in the greenhouse at the University of Copenhagen’s Biocenter.

In her spare time, she likes to hike in nature, and has been to many places in Scandinavia, as well as Iceland. Travelling is her biggest hobby, and she spends all her holidays that way.

»At home, I like to cook, because I enjoy it, and I like to invite guests to come and eat with me,« says Laura Arribas-Hernandez.

You can read an article from the Independent Research Fund Denmark about the grant to Laura Arribas-Hernandez, if you have become more curious about her research area.