NCBI
Home
Student Presentations

Class Project 1998

This page will evolve as the class continues.  The goal is to stimulate us to think as a bioinformatics group about the following biological question:

Organisms face many environmental changes.  A common challenge is to adapt carbon metabolism to the environment.  For example, yeast grow best in a glucose-rich medium, but as they exhaust the medium, glucose decreases.  At high glucose concentrations, yeast ferment glucose; at very low glucose concentrations, they respire.  As biologists, we would like to know how yeast adapt to these very different conditions and whether the mechanisms that yeast use to do this are common to other fungi.

We might ask ourselves the following questions:

• In what ways does gene expression differ under these conditions?

  • transcription

  • translation

  • metabolic activity

• How are changes in gene expression controlled?

• How do changes in gene expression affect metabolism?

• Are the mechanisms for changing metabolism conserved in other fungi, bacteria, plants, or animals?

• What implications do these observations have in a practical setting, such as the development of antifungal or antibacterial drugs?

Chuck Staben, copyright reserved || 10/26/98