Audrey Gasch

Title: Associate Professor of Genetics

Office: University of Wisconsin-Madison

Inferring Stress-Cctivated Signaling Networks in Yeast Reveals new Insights into Biology

 

Abstract: Cells react to stressful situations by orchestrating complex responses customized for each situation. Such multi-faceted responses include changes in transcript abundance, protein levels and modification, metabolic fluxes, and cellular structures. These changes are generally coupled with arrest of growth and cell-cycle progression, consistent with the idea that stress defense and proliferation represent competing interests in the cell. How disparate physiological processes are coordinated is poorly understood but likely critical for surviving and acclimating to stressful conditions. Here, I will present recent approaches in the lab for inferring signaling networks that control the stress-activated transcriptome and the stress-responsive phospho-proteome in budding yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, and leveraging the combined networks to make new inferences regarding stress responses and disease biology.

Audrey Gasch, Associate Professor of Genetics at UW-Madison, received her BS in Biochemistry from UW-Madison and her PhD from Stanford University under Pat Brown. Postdoctoral work under Mike Eisen at UC-Berkeley was motivated by the critical need for computational analysis of large datasets. Gasch recently received the UW-Madison H.I. Romnes Faculty Fellowship Award, received the CALS Pound Research Award in 2015, and has also received the NSF CAREER and Beckman Awards. Gasch grew up in central Wisconsin on a pig farm and was a concert flutist in college. Before farming, her parents worked for the CIA; her mom was one of the first computer programmers for the government and her dad was a satellite film analyst.