On Thursday, March 13, the Department of Biology hosted Greg Lang, associate professor of biological sciences at Lehigh University. Lang delivered a talk titled “Genome evolution in laboratory populations of yeast” as a part of the Department’s Seminar Series, and explored his lab’s work conducting experimental yeast evolution on the bench.
Yeast — particularly saccharomyces cerevisiae — have become ideal eukaryotic model organisms due to their extremely fast generation times, ease of genetic modification and well-annotated genomes.
“Yeast grows very quickly, so we get 10 generations of growth in a single day and over 3,000 generations of evolution in a year,” Lang said.
However, even with the…