UW Genome Sciences

 

Wednesdays, 3:30, Foege Auditorium (Foege S-060) unless otherwise noted | remote viewing option

UW Genome Sciences brings leading researchers from a broad spectrum of scientific areas to campus to discuss the latest advances in genetics, genomics, proteomics, computational research and related emerging tools and technologies.

subscribe or unsubscribe to the email list | past seminars

Not all seminars are recorded, but those which are will be posted to the past seminars page and deleted after two weeks. Please note that a current UW NetID is required to access past seminar recordings.

Spring 2026

4/1 - Dr. Huaiying Zhang | Carnegie Mellon University
"Formation and Function of Chromatin-Associated Condensates"
talk will not be recorded

4/8 - Dr. Steven McCarroll | Harvard University

4/15 - Dr. Andrew Murray | Harvard University
"Beyond DraftKings: Yeast cells also hedge their bets"
talk will be recorded | postdoc-invited speaker

Microorganisms live in unpredictable and rapidly changing environments. Bet-hedging is one way for a population to deal with this volatility: even though they share the same genome, different cells can use different strategies. In brewer’s yeast, we name the two strategies arrestors and recoverers: arrestors grow faster than recoverers on high glucose concentrations but fail to recover and restart growth when they must metabolize a worse carbon source, like ethanol, whereas recoverers eventually restart their growth and division. The two phenotypes result from the bistability of a dynamical system and are epigenetically heritable with switches from one to another occurring every few cell divisions. The heart of bistability is a competition between cytoplasmic and mitochondrial protein synthesis. Most mitochondrial proteins, including the protein components of the mitochondrial ribosome, are encoded in the nuclear genome and translated in the cytoplasm before being imported into the mitochondria. In contrast, the greasiest components of the electron transport chain are encoded in the mitochondrial DNA and are made by mitochondrial ribosomes. In recoverers, the charge difference across the mitochondrial inner membrane is high, they import the proteins of the mitochondrial ribosome, the ribosomes they form translate the mitochondrially encoded components of the electron transport chain, and the cells both respire and ferment glucose. In contrast, the charge difference across the mitochondrial inner membrane of arrestors is small, they fail to import the proteins of the mitochondrial ribosome, they cannot translate the mitochondrially encoded components of the electron transport chain and they can only ferment glucose. The steady state fractions of arrestors and recoverers are under genetic and environmental control and we can demonstrate this bistability as far as fission yeast, which last shared a common ancestor with budding yeast 500 million years ago.

 

4/22 - reserved

4/29 - no seminar

Thursday, 4/30, 1:00 - Dr. Mark Kokoris | Roche
sponsored jointly with UW Bioengineering

5/6 - Dr. Richard Sever | openRxiv

5/13 - Dr. Koseki Kobayashi | University of Chicago

5/20 -

5/27 - no seminar

6/3 - Dr. Pablo Cardenas | Cornell University

Autumn 2026

10/28 - Dr. Jonathan Pritchard | Stanford University

11/4 - Dr. Hernan Garcia | UC Berkeley