Juan Lucas Argueso
Colorado State University-Fort Collins, CO·Genetics
Genomes do not only change one DNA letter at a time. Large pieces of chromosomes can be copied, lost, or rearranged, and whole chromosomes can be gained or lost.
- Fields
Genetics
Biology
Biochemistry
- Topics
structural genomic variation
copy number variation
loss of heterozygosity
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2027
What they work on
- Measure rates of copy number variation (CNV), loss of heterozygosity (LOH), and whole-chromosome gain or loss in dividing and meiotic budding yeast cells, using custom, highly sensitive cell-based assays.
- Identify the forces that break chromosomes and the cellular mechanisms that prevent, survey, and repair this damage, using yeast assays and genomic analysis to characterize the resulting structural changes.
- Investigate systemic genomic instability (SGI), a recently reported process in which yeast cells acquire many chromosomal rearrangements at once and radically reconfigure their genomes.
- Determine the effects of chromosomal rearrangements on traits in a diploid Saccharomyces cerevisiae strain that, like the human genome, has high heterozygosity, structural differences between paired chromosomes, gene redundancy, and CNVs.
More about the research
This structural variation is a major source of genetic diversity in humans and other organisms, yet it is poorly understood. Researchers still know little about what causes genome structure to change and how those changes affect living organisms. The lab uses budding yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae), a simple, easily engineered model, to study both questions.
Why it matters
Copy number variations contribute to human diseases including cancer and autism. Studying how they form and what they do in diploid yeast, whose genome is more flexible like ours, could help uncover risk factors that lead to CNV formation in humans. It also adds basic understanding of how genome structure changes during evolution.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Amy MacQueen
Wesleyan University, CT·Genetics
Define how the N terminus of Zip1, a synaptonemal complex building block, works with the Zip3 SUMO ligase to promote crossover recombination in budding yeast, using structure-function genetic analysis.
Nathaniel Sharp
University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI·Ecology & Evolution
Test whether yeast cells of a species' rarer type, haploid or diploid, have higher mutation rates, by measuring ploidy-specific mutation patterns in haploid- and diploid-dominant yeast species.
Marjorie Matocq
University of Nevada-Reno, NV·Ecology & Evolution
Identify individual copy number variation (CNV), differences in how many copies each animal carries, in detoxification genes across a woodrat hybrid zone between Neotoma fuscipes and N. macrotis, using genome sequencing.
The school
Colorado State University-Fort Collins: 23 labs on PI Pages, $466M a year on research, 276 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.