| evolutionary genetics group | ::: | institute | ::: | university | ::: |  |
| Dominika M. Wloch-Salamon, PhD dominika.wloch-salamon@uj.edu.pl |
Inst. of Environmental Sciences Jagiellonian University Gronostajowa 7, 30-387 Kraków Poland phone + 48 12 664 51 35 fax + 48 12 664 69 12 |
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My favorite and most often used experimental organism is yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae (http://www.yeastgenome.org): laboratory, isolated from nature (wild) and killer strains.
Experimental evolution: using of eukaryotic yeast cultures in experiments give a chance to observe changes in organisms adopting to new conditions, in a time scale accessible for a researcher. Arising changes could be the key to understand general mechanism in the natural word such as rate and interactions of mutations.
Social behavior of microorganism: clonal populations of microorganisms show some features (such as specialization of function of the cell in the colony) which allow to treat them as a multicellular organisms. Production of the toxins directed towards competitors (individuals from different population) is an example of the spite behavior, which reduce fitness of the toxin producer but in general brings benefits to the whole population.
Programmed cell death (PCD) - mechanism of PCD is found and confirmed also among single cell organisms such as yeast. One of the factors provoking apoptosis in yeast cells is low concentration of yeast killer toxins. Mechanisms of this process is well known however its evolutionary significance is not fully explained.
d e s i g n e d b y P a w e ³ K a p u s t a