Principal Investigator: Fabien Duveau

One of the most fascinating properties of living organisms is their capacity to survive and reproduce in a dynamically changing world. Cells face this challenge by using a myriad of molecular mechanisms to sense their environment and regulate their genome’s expression accordingly. We seek to understand how such regulatory mechanisms emerge and are modified during evolution, which has important implications for evolutionary biology and biomedical research.

Building on recent transcriptomic advances, we study how the evolution of gene expression regulation depends on mutational constraints – “what can happen?”, and on the added value of regulating expression in dynamic environments – “who can survive?”. We tackle these fundamental questions at the genome-wide scale through a combination of innovative experimental and computational approaches using a powerful model organism: the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae.