Five questions with… Audrey Gasch

Brewers and bakers can’t do without yeast, and neither can science. For decades, researchers have used the yeast cell as a model for how cells work in general, including our own. Following this tradition, assistant genetics professor Audrey Gasch has studied the responses of yeast to environmental fluctuations and stress in the lab for years. Lately, though, she has begun looking beyond common laboratory yeast strains to wild cells collected from locations worldwide. Her work is now uncovering a wealth of natural variation that has implications for everything from human medicine to biofuels.

Wisconsin Week: What’s the research question most on your mind right now?

Gasch: We’ve gotten some really exciting results showing how gene transcription varies in wild yeast strains. We found that strains isolated from different environments, like from grapes in Italy versus soil in Pennsylvania, have very different tolerances to environmental factors, such as high temperature, starvation and nutrient availability. What’s exciting is that we’ve recently identified specific genes that are transcribed differently in these strains and may explain why their environmental tolerances are so different.

Wisconsin Week: How did you first get interested in biology?

Gasch: I was a farm kid, so that’s pretty much what started it! I remember being really fascinated with nature and genetics in particular, since I grew up on a hog farm. My parents also had broad interests so I guess I learned from them how to be curious and amazed by the world around us.

Wisconsin Week: Who has had the most influence on your thinking as a scientist?

Gasch: I think I’d have to say my adviser from graduate school, Pat Brown. He always got the most excited by completely unexpected results, even if they blew apart his hypothesis. He was also always motivated by the big picture and how our results could be broadly applied to biology, and that’s what’s most fun for me.

Wisconsin Week: What outcomes do you see from your work for society?

Gasch: Actually, I hope it’s quite a lot. On the one hand, we do a lot of basic research — understanding how things work in yeast can tell us a great deal about biology in other organisms, including humans, since much of the cellular biology is conserved.

On the other hand, much of what we do can have a direct impact, since yeast are used industrially in food and beverage production and bioethanol processing. In fact, we’re now working quite heavily on the biofuels front to use what we’ve learned about natural phenotypic variation and stress defense in yeast to generate better yeast for biofuel production.

Wisconsin Week: What’s the coolest thing you’ve learned through your research?

Gasch: The coolest thing I’ve learned is how much we still don’t understand about biology! Yeast has been used as a model organism for nearly a century, and many people think that because of that we really understand it as an organism. But in our lab we’re using a lot of new ways to look at how cells behave, and in particular looking at conditions that are more relevant to them in the wild, and we uncover one surprise after the next. It’s really great fun.

Editor’s note: This is part of a series of stories introducing researchers and their work to campus. Do you have a suggestion for a person to highlight? E-mail wisweek@wisc.edu.