Matt Anderson

Education

Ph.D., Stanford University

Research

The Anderson Lab is interested in how genetic diversity contributes to variation in species populations. To address these questions we utilize the major human fungal pathogen Candida albicans, a harmless commensal of the gastrointestinal tract and opportunistic pathogen. This yeast has an incredibly plastic genome capable of undergoing full ploidy shifts, haboring aneuploidy, experiencing large-scale loss of heterozygosity, and rapidly acquiring mutation. We take advantage of these processes to understand how members of expanded gene families have obtained function in the context of many other paralogs as well as defining the relationship between genotype and phenotype with respect to the balance between commensalism and pathogenesis. Additional work in the lab centers on understanding the role of microbial eukaryotes in the human microbiome. We recently developed a system to analyze the ‘eukaryome’ via metagenomics and are applying this technique with our Lakota partners in investigating links to autoimmunity within their community.