How do essential cellular mechanisms evolve?
While early works highlighted the universal principles shared by cells of different kingdoms, new studies are uncovering remarkable differences in how different species execute essential functions. Different species pack their genomes in different sets of chromosomes, which are replicated, segregated, and repaired by different subsets of proteins. The origins of this variability are still a mystery.
We have recently demonstrated how genome maintenance mechanisms are capable of quick evolutionary re-wiring when perturbed, showing how the evolutionary cell biology of essential processes can be studied experimentally.
In our lab we take advantage of S.cerevisiae as a model eukaryotic organism and we investigate the molecular mechanisms that allow cells to adapt to challanges in genome maintenance.
We use a multidisciplinary approach that takes advantage of techniques and concepts spanning across biological scales: From molecular and cellular biology to genomics, evolutionary and population genetics.
Open Science
We do our best to promote Open Science. Below are a number of initiatives and associations we support:
