Thursday, September 12th, 2013
NYU Biology Ph.D. candidate Naomi Ziv, working with David Gresham and Mark Siegal, has validated a longstanding prediction about nutrient-limited growth in microbes. Jacques Monod predicted, over 60 years ago, that growth rate would be a saturating function of the concentration of the limiting nutrient. Prior evidence supporting the prediction had been indirect, because of the difficulty of monitoring growth at low nutrient concentrations. Ziv broke this technological barrier using time-lapse microscopy and automated image processing to monitor the growth of lineages founded by single yeast cells in carbon-poor environments. Her results, published in Molecular Biology and Evolution, support Monod's prediction and also demonstrate that wild yeast populations harbor genetic variation affecting growth-rate mean and variance. Her work therefore sets the stage for mapping genes underlying natural variation in these key, fitness-related parameters.
To view the article, please click here.
