The UB Department of Biological Sciences is pleased to announce that Campbell Vogt, a student in our Honors program, has won a grant from the Rochester Academy of Sciences to carry out research with Dr. Laura Rusche. Vogt’s research focuses on the evolutionary history of the yeast protein Sir3, which blocks gene expression, and is a major focus of the Rusche lab.
Sir3 arose through gene duplication from a conserved protein required for DNA replication, called Orc1. Vogt will compare Sir3 and Orc1 sequences from many yeast species, to reconstruct the ancestral sequence at key points in its evolution. She will then use the grant funding to express these reconstructed proteins in yeast and test their functions. Read the full description of Vogt’s award-winning research, published in the news bulletin of the Rochester Academy of Sciences.