Non-targeted metabolomic investigation of Yeast nutrient sensor mechanisms of action

Receptors play central roles in the response to stimuli in all organisms. In the yeast S. cerevisiae, receptors are important regulators of the response of the cell to its nutritional environment. Key among yeast nutrient sensing proteins are transceptors, which are transporters with signaling activity. The understanding of the roles of transceptors within the cell is confounded by the fact that the substrates for transceptors are also metabolites. This makes it difficult to disentangle which metabolomic changes are due to signaling through the transceptor, and which ones are due to an increase in the availability of the metabolite within the metabolic network.

In this project, the student will probe the activity of transceptor proteins in yeast by profiling the effect of the induced overexpression of these proteins on the metabolome. This will be done using a cutting-edge, non-targeted metabolomics pipeline developed within the Sauer group. The student will be responsible for both generating inducible overexpression alleles of a selection of transceptors, as well as working with a subset of transceptor overexpression mutants that have already been cloned.

This project is ideally suited to a semester project framework due to the flexibility of the cloning steps of the project. The workload within this project will consist of approximately 70% wet lab work and 30% computational analysis of metabolomic data sets.

Interested students should contact Duncan Holbrook-Smith ().