Dr. Nishant K.T’s group (School of Biology) along with collaborators from Colorado State University and the University of North Carolina, published a paper in PNAS USA characterizing systemic genomic instability using yeast as a model.
Mutations are conventionally thought to accumulate independently and gradually over many generations. In this publication, the authors used budding yeast to track the appearance of chromosomal changes resulting in loss-of-heterozygosity. In contrast to the prevailing model, their results provide evidence for the existence of a path for nonindependent accumulation of multiple chromosomal alteration events over a few generations.
This result suggests systemic genomic instability that is also observed in cancer cells and provides a tractable system to study such punctuated bursts of mutation accumulation.
The research is published in the latest issue of PNAS USA (https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2010303117).