Maheshri Research Group

Dynamics and variability in gene regulation and function

Our interests lie in two broad areas:

  • probing and understanding the dynamics of gene regulation and how those dynamics can lead to large variability in gene expression amongst even a genetically homogeneous populations
  • developing methods to rapidly introduce variability in protein expression and sequence for the directed evolution of multigenic traits

We take an interdisciplinary and often quantitative approach to these problems that involves combining theory, computation and experiment. Our focus is in vivo and we exploit budding yeast in much of our work due to its facile genetics and molecular biology. We welcome folks with a wide range of scientific and engineering backgrounds.

Recent work

Tek Hyung's work in Molecular Systems Biology describes how tandem repeats of transcription factor binding sites appear to bind the transcription factor more tightly than the promoter. This leads to a qualitative change in the dose-response of that transcription factors target promoters that depends quantitatively on the tandem repeat number. The work calls attention to another mechanism by which variability in tandem repeat number can lead to qualitative changes in gene expression and the behavior of genetic regulatory networks. Read a summary here and find the work here.

News

Shawn's mutagenesis work featured article in NAR

Shawn has developed a system for targeted mutagenesis in vivo in budding yeast, which has been accepted as a featured article in Nucleic Acids Research. All constructs will be available via AddGene for anyone to try! 2/14/13

CJ's thesis defense and graduation

Congratulations on a successful defense! 1/31/13

Tek-Hyung to Stanford

Tek-Hyung will be pursuing post-doctoral work in Jim Ferrell's group. Good luck and enjoy the weather! 1/31/13

CJ's methods accepted in JoVE

CJ's will describe his methods for measuring real-time transcription in growing yeast cells in a video in the Journal for Visualized Experiments. The associated software is available! 1/23/13