Excited to announce that we were awarded our first NSF grant titled “Genetic Basis and Evolution of the Transcriptional Response to Oxidative Stress in Diverse Yeasts”. With this award, we will use ROS resistance as a model to unravel the general rules governing the evolution of stress resistance traits. Read more …

We will study this in our favorite phylogenetic clade – the Saccharomycotina subphylum (budding yeasts), which include multiple, independently derived human commensals and opportunistic pathogens. Oxidative stress is a major weapon used by our immune system to effectively kill invading microbes, including yeast pathogens. Very limited sampling in the literature suggests that pathogenic lineages exhibit a stronger resistance to one of the common reactive oxygen species (ROS), hydrogen peroxide. We will extend this study to cover a wide span of more than 400 million years of evolution, and determine the patterns and rules for both the phenotypic evolution (resistance) and the evolution of the underlying transcriptional response and gene regulatory networks. Lots to do!