Thursday, October 6th, 2011
Mutations are the raw material for evolution and a cause of many human diseases. With a recently awarded 4-year $2.3 M grant from the National Institutes of Health, Mark Siegal of the NYU CGSB will lead a collaborative effort with scientists at NYU, Stanford and the University of Georgia to characterize, with unprecedented precision, the rates and effects of different classes of mutations. The team will use the latest DNA sequencing technologies to identify all mutations that have occurred in a large panel of yeast strains that have been propagated for 2,000 generations. Dr. Siegal's laboratory will also characterize the effects of these mutations on fitness by using a novel, high-throughput growth assay and new computational tools that his group has developed. This research will yield the most comprehensive picture of the spectrum of spontaneous mutations in eukaryotic organisms.
