All living organisms respond to changes in external factors such as macronutrient depletion.
Often, a multitude of responses will be triggered in order to overcome or counteract environmental stress factors. In addition, the intensity and the time lag for such responses reflect the biochemical network that is laid out by the genetic and structural constraints of a given organism. We want to study which metabolic rescue mechanisms are triggered in response to various environmental and nutritional stress factors and why (and how) related strains or species differ from the model organism that we have chosen: Chlamydomonas reinhardtii.
Chlamydomonas is a unicellular alga that is very well suited for such complex studies: it is a robust organism that occurs naturally in various environments, its genome is sequenced, and genetic tools and mutant and RNAi strains are available through the Chlamydomonas research community. It is biochemically related to other Eukaryotes like yeast but it also shares biochemical relationships to higher plants, like a chloroplast and starch synthesis. We aim at exploiting a variety of cutting-edge technologies in mass spectrometry and statistics to identify and quantify large metabolic networks for both metabolites and soluble enzymes.
And, who knows, maybe we will detect novel pathways?
Do Yup Lee
http://fiehnlab.ucdavis.edu/staff/lee