Congratulations to all the winners of poster awards at the Yeast Genetics Meeting 2022!

Undergraduate 

Austin Lytle, Morehead State University

Poster Title: Genetically engineering a strain of S. cerevisiae with a single circular chromosome

“Using our experimental approach, I successfully circularized Ch. II in S. ceraviseae and current analysis shows no phenotypic differences between the circular and wild type strain.”

Naomi Moresi, University of Washington

Poster Title: yEvo Lab: A University-High School Collaboration to Evolve Caffeine Tolerance in Yeast

“Working in collaboration with high school classrooms to evolve caffeine tolerance in yeast through experimental evolutions.”

Vanessa Pereira, Concordia University

Poster Title: Genetic Network Rewiring Between Distantly Related Yeast Species

“I investigate the conservation of the genetic interaction network between two distantly related yeast species, Schizosaccharomyces pombe and Saccharomyces cerevisiae.”

Graduate 

Julie Chuong, New York University

Poster Title: The effect of genome architecture on copy number variant dynamics during adaptive evolution

“I study the effects of natural and genome variation on copy number variant formation and dynamics during adaptive evolution.”

Kate Morse, UC Berkeley

Poster Title: Investigating Transcriptional Interference Induced by Long Undecoded Transcript Isoform (LUTI) Expression

“I study the mechanism underlying transcriptional repression that occurs by reathrough transcription from long noncoding mRNAs called LUTIs.”

Dayag Sheykhkarimli, University of Toronto

Poster Title: Environmental protein interaction dynamics at proteome scale

“We multiplexed millions of Yeast Two-Hybrid experiments across dozens of perturbations via Barcode Fusion Genetics technology, yielding the first atlas of proteome-wide dynamic interactome maps for yeast.”

Karla Zuniga Gonzalez, The University of Manchester 

Poster Title: Regulation and consequences of SNF1/AMPK complex control across different stress conditions. 

“Understanding how the stress-specific coordination of SNF1 kinase complex aligns the adaptive response to glucose depletion and oxidative stress in Saccharomyces cerevisiae.”

GSA is pleased to announce the recipients of the DeLill Nasser Award for Professional Development in Genetics for Spring 2022! Given twice a year to graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, DeLill Nasser Awards support attendance at meetings and laboratory courses.

The award is named in honor of DeLill Nasser, a long-time GSA supporter and National Science Foundation Program Director in Eukaryotic Genetics. Nasser was regarded by some as the “patron saint of real genetics,” shaping the field through more than two decades of leadership. She was especially supportive of young scientists, people who were beginning their careers, and those trying to open new areas of genetic inquiry. For more about Nasser, please see the tribute from Scott Hawley, published in the August 2001 issue of GENETICS.

Jon Hibshman

Postdoctoral fellow, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

“My research seeks to understand how some animals can survive extreme stresses like desiccation.”

Diedre Reitz

Postdoctoral fellow, University of California, Davis

“My research aims to understand the mechanisms responsible for preventing homologous recombination-mediated genome rearrangements between repetitive elements.”

Anna Moyer

Postdoctoral fellow, University of Alabama, Birmingham

“I use zebrafish to understand how the overexpression of chromosome 21 genes contributes to abnormal brain development in people with Down syndrome.”

Jennifer Chik

Postdoctoral fellow, University of California, San Diego

“My research focuses on identifying and characterizing multi-functional proteins with roles in two critical pathways: amino acid metabolism and chromatin regulation.”

Shannon Hateley

Postdoctoral fellow, Carnegie Institution for Science

“I use computational biology and ecological genomics methods to investigate how plants will adapt to climate change.”

Maria Sterrett

PhD candidate, Emory University

“We study human disease mutations that impact conserved RNA regulatory pathways by modeling the mutations in yeast and assessing the functional and molecular consequences using genetics and biochemistry techniques.”

Emily Hendricks

Master’s student, Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville

“My research uses Drosophila to study the molecular mechanisms of synaptic dysregulation in neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative diseases.”

Uzezi Okinedo

PhD candidate, University of Massachusetts, Boston

“I study the genetic basis of adaptation in African rice (Oryza glaberrima) to identify and characterize domestication loci for potential genetic improvement.”

Sophia Sanchez

PhD candidate, University of Texas, Austin

“We leverage C. elegans to understand the individual contribution of Hsa21 genes to cellular and molecular phenotypes that could be important in Down syndrome.”

Vladimir Lazetic

Postdoctoral fellow, University of California, San Diego

“My research focuses on uncovering novel mechanisms that regulate an immune response against viral and fungal pathogens.”

Four GSA communities are excited to meet in person in 2022 — and to experiment with hybrid conferences that combine the benefits of online and in-person meetings.

After two years of online meetings of all kinds, we are thrilled to return to scientific conversations in person! In 2022, many of us will be together again, enjoying the science—and the company—at our regular in-person conferences with virtual attendance options. #Fungal22 and #PEQG22 will take place at Asilomar in Pacific Grove, California and #Dros22 will be in San Diego, California. #Yeast22 will be held in person at a location to be announced soon. All four organizing committees are working hard on creating can’t-miss programs to reunite and recharge their communities.

A few of the things we have missed most about scientific conferences “in real life” include meeting new colleagues at random, building stronger relationships with old colleagues, having unscheduled but in-depth conversations, discovering amazing talks far outside our specialties, and being able to dedicate focused time to the meeting away from everyday life. The intellectual buzz of several intense days of science at a GSA meeting is an enriching experience that has immediate results: new ideas, new collaborations, new jobs, new friends. 

Of course, we learned a lot from our experiments with online conferences in 2020 and 2021. For example, having the talks recorded ended the ubiquitous fear of missing out on something exciting in a concurrent session. And more people were able to ask questions via chat than was ever possible via a microphone. Most importantly, we learned that the virtual format could be more inclusive, lowering barriers to participation.

So, in 2022, GSA is leading the way in conference innovation  once again, this time with offering virtual attendance options alongside the full in-person conference, including opportunities to present online and access talk recordings, posters, and professional development events. While there is no way for us to completely replicate the in-person experience online, we hope that these select virtual options will translate to new “hybrid vigor” for GSA conferences by opening the experience to remote participants and enhancing the experience for those on site.

This flexibility seems even more critical while we continue to endure the uncertainty and risks of a pandemic. Because we understand that making future travel plans is difficult right now, we are adopting a flexible registration policy that will allow registrants to change from the in-person to virtual options (or vice versa) up until the month before the meeting.

As scientists, we all know that experiments come with costs. In this case, the new format has much higher labor, contractor, equipment, and technology costs than either an in-person or an online-only event. Note that the 2022 conferences are not expected to break even.

The past 18 months of conference experiments have been financially costly for the GSA, but also rewarding. Crucially, we have invested in these trials in order to maintain community connections and scientific contributions in a time of need. Despite the anticipated losses, we consider the virtual attendance option in 2022 to be an important step in learning how to balance the needs of in-person and online participants. We are excited to see what happens and to continue to evolve how scientists meet and exchange ideas.

2021 GSA Executive Committee

Hugo Bellen, President

E. Jane Hubbard, Vice-President

Denise J. Montell, Immediate Past President

Erika L. Matunis, Secretary

Michael Buszczak, Treasurer

Steven Munger, Member at Large

Tracey DePellegrin, GSA Executive Director

Guest post by Christian R. Landry. #TAGC16 Shorts are brief summaries of presentations at The Allied Genetics Conference, a combined meeting of seven genetics research communities held July 13-17, 2016 in Orlando, Florida.

When building new phenotypes, evolution often draws on mutations of the intricate mechanisms that regulate gene expression. If such regulatory mutations are  associated with the affected genes themselves, they are known as cis regulatory mutations; if the mutations are associated with other genes they are said to act in trans. One trick that researchers have used to differentiate these two effects is to create F1 hybrids between their strains of interest, in which they can follow the expression of two alleles independently. Unequal expression of the two alleles reveals the influence of cis acting mutations. Most studies so far have measured mRNA abundance at steady state and have shown that mutations affecting how much mRNA is present are frequent within and between species. However, survival in a changing environment may depend less on the amount of mRNA produced and more on the time it takes to produce it.  But until recently it was largely unknown whether cis acting mutations also affect the timing of gene expression. Ching-Huah Shih, a postdoctoral fellow working with Justin Fay at Washington University, is exploiting the hybrid approach to learn whether cis regulatory variation that affects the dynamics of induction occurs in budding yeast populations and species.

To do so, he measures genome-wide mRNA abundance along a time-course of gene expression induction in hybrids. In a talk presented at the workshop on yeast diversity of the GSA Yeast Genetics Meeting, Ching-Hua showed that cis regulatory variation affecting induction dynamics is as abundant as variation affecting steady-state levels. One major question that emerges from this observation is whether dynamics and steady state levels can be optimized independently from each other by natural selection. Ching-Hua provided a partial yet key answer to this question by showing that species differences in steady-state levels are significantly associated with nucleotide substitutions in the promoter regions, whereas the dynamics are associated with insertions and deletions. Yeast promoter regions are rich in simple sequence repeats that evolve fast by gaining and losing repeat units. Natural selection may thus have plenty of variation to play with to fine-tune gene expression dynamics. One important challenge ahead will be to examine whether natural selection prefers tuning gene expression timing rather than abundance.   

P2068B Cis-acting variation in gene expression dynamics within and between Saccharomyces species. Ching-Hua Shih.

TAGC16 Workshop: Beyond cerevisiae: Exploiting yeast diversity in nature to understand genome evolution in diverse environments Organizers: Christian Landry, Universite Laval, Quebec, Canada, and Judith Berman, Tel Aviv University, Israel.

About the author: Christian R. Landry, Université Laval. Christian is doing research in evolutionary systems biology. You can follow him on twitter: @landrychristian and follow the work of his team at http://landrylab.ibis.ulaval.ca/

The Allied Genetics Conference brought seven genetics research communities together in Orlando to share great science and make new scientific connections. Watch the video below to see a few highlights from the meeting.

The Allied Genetics Conference – TAGC – is coming up soon (July 13 to 17 in Orlando), with an abstract submission deadline of March 23. This pan-genetics meeting features seven of the GSA communities: C. elegans; Ciliates; Drosophila; Mouse; Population, Evolutionary & Quantitative Genetics; Yeast; and Zebrafish. I think you should be there, because someday you’ll be a lot older.

TAGC is your own individual community meeting (with its invited speakers and award winners) as usual, plus joint sessions with everyone else. You can turn up at any session you like. But you may not appreciate one of the main reasons for attending TAGC until some time has passed: like at least a couple more decades.

Of course I’ll tell you that we have a dazzling array of speakers – including Cori Bargmann, Francis S. Collins, Jennifer Doudna, and Svante Pääbo – who will give keynote lectures; that you’ll learn the latest technologies; that you can go to sessions on your favorite biological process – in several different organisms; that there will be individual meeting workshops as well as joint workshops on topics like CRISPR technology. But grad students and postdocs: you probably won’t fully appreciate what you get from being at TAGC until you’re into your fifties.

TAGC will have mentoring luncheons, “next stage” mixers where grad students talk to undergrads and postdocs talk to grad students, and editors presenting the ins and outs of journals. Panel discussions will focus on women in genetics, and bootcamp workshops on finding a job, obtaining funding, and getting published. Career coaches will give advice, provide interview tips and critique your CV. But you may be closer to the end of your career than its beginning when you most appreciate TAGC. Here’s why.

Not long ago, a bunch of my buddies came out to Seattle to help me celebrate one of my “big” birthdays (my 60^th). About half of them – as you might expect – were people I had worked together with in the same lab or the same department, going back to my graduate student days. Sharing a few years of lab time with someone is like being adopted by a new family living in a tiny apartment, and it hardly seems surprising that some of these people become lifelong friends.

But the other half were people I had met through attending meetings – in my case, principally the GSA-sponsored Yeast Genetics Meeting. So think about that a second: why did these biologists troop out to the Northwest to attend my birthday party when they had never worked in the same place as me? Were those old yeast meetings so wild that the mere thought of them years later induced these folks to give up a couple of days to celebrate with me? Not quite.

One of these buddies, whom I first met at a yeast meeting, ended up collaborating with me on several projects that led to multiple publications. Another later wrote with me both a spoof on genomic nomenclature that appeared in a surprising venue, as well as a book on genetics for the general public. Yet another was my predecessor as president of a science society and taught me the ropes. Still another who accepted the birthday invite organized a national meeting, with me as co-organizer and successor. And so on.

People I got to know at yeast meetings ended up being as close as labmates and came to interact with me at many scientific and personal levels over a span of many years. The science meetings we go to include a lot of people just like us, with similar passions and energies and visions. When we first encounter some of these people – in person rather than in silico – we realize that we’d like to spend more time with them and take on new challenges together.

So now when I go to scientific meetings, I enjoy the talks, the poster sessions, the workshops – all essential to keep us up to date in our field. But even more, I enjoy seeing old friends again and making new ones, because some of these old friends came to be among the closest I’ve ever made.

Now, you might not stay in your career with the organism that attracts you to TAGC – maybe you’re a Drosophila developmental geneticist who later moves into human neurobiology, or a mouse geneticist who ends up in a pharmaceutical company. And some of those kindred spirits in the fly or mouse community you get to know at TAGC may themselves change research fields or come to focus on education or journalism or public policy.

But these career changes won’t matter: when it feels like a good match, you might find yourself 30+ years in the future inviting that someone to a birthday party. And reminiscing at the party about how you came to know each other in Orlando.

For another take on the wonders of Orlando in July, check out my lab’s spoof video for #IAmGSA at https://genestogenomes.org/next-to-a-fern-iamgsa/