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The bakers yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae is an ideal model organism to understand mechanisms of meiotic chromosome segregation. In S. cerevisiae and in mammals, the majority of meiotic crossovers are formed through a highly conserved MSH4p-MSH5p, MLH1p-MLH3p dependent pathway. We are interested in charactering the role of these complexes in crossover formation and distribution among all homolog pairs. Errors in this process are linked to congenital birth defects in humans such as Down's syndrome.Our laboratory is also interested in understanding the effect of genetic background on mutation rate variation using S. cerevisiae as a model. These studies are relevant for understanding cancer progression, genome evolution and architecture. We use high- throughput genomic methods as well as classical genetics to achieve these aims. | |
