Jeffrey Lewis, an associate professor of biological sciences at the University of Arkansas, has received a $2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to study how cells vary in their responses to stress.
In his application for the grant, Lewis noted that “proper regulation of stress defenses is a feature of healthy cells and organisms, and defects in stress defense are connected to a number of human disorders.”
Lewis said the proposal will take advantage of natural variation in stress signaling in yeast to explore why certain individuals are more susceptible or resilient to stress, with a focus on less well-understood post-transcriptional and post-translational modes of regulation, according to a press release. The term “post-transcriptional” refers to the period after DNA has been converted into RNA to make proteins.
“We have a bunch of different wild yeast strains in the lab, and some of them are super resistant to stress,” Lewis said. “Some of them are super sensitive to stress. Think heat stress or nutritional stress, starvation, anything that they would encounter in their environment. Some individuals do better, and some do worse. And with yeast, we can cross these strains like you would cross plants. But unlike plants, we can get back millions and millions of different individuals because yeast are a microbe and it’s really easy to generate millions of progeny.”
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