Research: Candida albicans is an opportunistic pathogenic yeast with a high mortality rate
due to its acquisition of antifungal resistance during clinical treatment. While
several mechanisms of drug resistance have been identified in isolates recovered
from patients, such as copy number variation and single base pair mutations, the
importance of much of the genetic variability among strains remains unexplored.
My project combines bioinformatics and molecular biology with de novo genome
assembly comparison and genome engineering to identify and characterize
previously unrecognized sources of variation in Candida albicans. I am
investigating the role of structural variants such as transposable elements in
driving phenotypic divergence between clinical isolates to better predict and
understand the mechanisms by which the Candida albicans genome evolves
during treatment.
