Juan Lucas Argueso

My research program focuses on the biology of chromosomes. Specifically, I am interested in the environmental factors that disrupt chromosome structural integrity, and the cellular mechanisms that counteract these forces by repairing broken DNA. To address these questions, my research takes full advantage of the unmatched genomic investigation tools available in the Saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast model system. My laboratory has developed two powerful assay systems to detect and characterize chromosomal rearrangements associated with de novo copy number variation (CNV) that occurs in mitosis and meiosis. We are using these assays to dissect the molecular mechanisms of CNV formation and to identify environmental exposures that can increase the base rate gene amplification and deletion. My laboratory is also interested in the phenotypic consequences of CNV and loss-of-heterozygosis (LOH) in complex genomes, and we study this problem using a highly heterozygous diploid industrial yeast strain as our model system.