What are you currently working on?
Dr. Patrick Lajoie Associate Professor More about his research https://bit.ly/LajoieLab Contact Info plajoie3@uwo.ca (519) 661-2111 Ext. 88220
“We’re a cell biology lab and we're interested in how cells respond to stress, especially how they regulate their gene expression to adapt to stress during the aging process. We are particularly interested in protein misfolding and the how the inability of fold proteins properly is associated with human diseases such as Huntington's Disease. We do that is by using yeast as a model organism. Yeast have been shown to recapitulate several of the basic mechanisms associated with how cells function in humans. Many of human diseases have the aging as contribution factor. If you think about diseases like Alzheimer's, and Huntington's, for example, these are diseases people get when they're older. Another question that we are interested in is the resistance to antifungals drugs. We recently started to work with fungal pathogens such as Candida albicans and are investigating how pathogens can acquire resistance to drugs through regulating cells stress responses.”
“Yeast have been shown to recapitulate a lot of the basic mechanisms associated with how cells work in other animals and humans.” What are some future research goals?
“We are looking forward to understanding these pathways and doing more translational work. For example, we started working with pathogens. A lot of our work so far has been done using the common baker’s yeast that people use to make bread because it is the canonical model organism. Determining the genetics in other fungi, especially in yeast pathogens, has previously been very hard to do because people didn't have the genetic tools to look at this. But now we have genome editing capabilities that we did not have 10 years ago.”
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