Audrey P. Gasch

Research

Organisms exist in dynamic relationship with their environments, sensing and responding to environmental fluctuations that can influence how cells and organisms function.  Many conditions, such as environmental toxins and extreme condition shifts, pose stressful situations that can perturb physiology if left unattended.  Thus, all cells have intricate systems for sensing their environments, detecting when there is a problem, and mounting a response to maintain a healthy system.  Organism-environment interactions have shaped organismal form and function over evolution timeframes, but they also affect individuals during their lifespan.  In fact, defects in responding appropriately to cellular stress are linked to many diseases, including cancer and aging.

The Gasch Lab is dedicated to understanding the principles of eukaryotic environmental-stress defenses.  We integrate novel approaches in functional and comparative genomics, computational analysis, systems biology, and genetics and molecular analysis to understand how cells sense and respond to stress.  We primarily study the model eukaryote budding yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the darling of systems biology that allows us to address new questions in stress biology with implications for other organisms including humans.

Representative Publications  (Google Scholar | PUBMED)

• Ho, Y. H., Shishkova, E., Hose, J., Coon, J. J. & Gasch, A. P. Decoupling Yeast Cell Division and Stress Defense Implicates mRNA Repression in Translational Reallocation during Stress. Current biology : CB 28, 2673-2680 e2674, doi:10.1016/j.cub.2018.06.044 (2018).
• Sardi, M. et al. Genome-wide association across Saccharomyces cerevisiae strains reveals substantial variation in underlying gene requirements for toxin tolerance. PLoS genetics 14, e1007217, doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.1007217 (2018).
• Gasch, A. P. et al. Single-cell RNA sequencing reveals intrinsic and extrinsic regulatory heterogeneity in yeast responding to stress. PLoS biology 15, e2004050, doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.2004050 (2017).
• Hose, J. et al. Dosage compensation can buffer copy-number variation in wild yeast. eLife 4, doi:10.7554/eLife.05462 (2015).
• Chasman, D. et al. Pathway connectivity and signaling coordination in the yeast stress-activated signaling network. Molecular systems biology 10, 759, doi:10.15252/msb.20145120 (2014).