**PLEASE NOTE – the deadline for requesting a funding pack from Darwin Trust has now passed and completed funding applications must be submitted to Darwin Trust by 19th January. We can still accept applications for this project from self-funding students.
Understanding cellular decision-making is a fundamental challenge, and insights from model organisms are important for developing a framework for human cells. Yeast cells grow on a variety of different carbon sources and sense these carbon sources with signalling networks analogous to the ones our own cells use to sense hormones. In the wild, yeast likely experience mixtures of carbon sources, but most experiments have been performed for media with a single carbon source.
In this project, you will determine the strategies used by yeast to choose between different carbon sources. Cells sense the carbon available and then decide the appropriate enzymes to express based on their estimates of the likely availability of carbon in the future, the quality of the different possible carbon sources, and on their own behaviour in the past. You will focus on how signalling and genetic networks work together to endow cells with these decision-making abilities.
The techniques you will use range from tagging and deleting genes using CRISPR to time-lapse fluorescence microscopy and RNAseq analysis to simple mathematical modelling of the core decision-making network.
For such decisions, yeast use kinases that are highly conserved, including TOR and AMP kinase. We therefore expect that the strategies you uncover to be used widely by other eukaryotic cells.
More information on our work is available at https://swainlab.bio.ed.ac.uk
The School of Biological Sciences is committed to Equality & Diversity: https://www.ed.ac.uk/biology/equality-and-diversity
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