Ryosuke Kita
Biology, MSTP
Bio-X Bowes Fellow 2013/2014
Profs. Hunter Fraser (Biology) and David Stevens (Medicine)

Cases of human infection by S. cerevisiae, baker’s yeast, have been increasingly reported since the 1990s. As an experimentally tractable model organism, S. cerevisiae is an ideal system to study the evolution of emerging fungal infectious disease. During the evolution of S. cerevisiae from a harmless microbe to a pathogenic state, a number of genetic changes occur. Ryo aims to identify the changes that are important and investigate the evolutionary path to pathogenicity using quantitative genetics and experimental evolution.