Barry L. Williams
Assistant Professor
Ph. D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2001
41 Giltner Hall
Office Telephone: 517-432-3484
barryw@msu.edu
Research website
Evolutionary and Poulation Genetics; Genetic Basis of Adaptation in Yeast
Research in the Williams’ lab seeks to determine, at the molecular level, the ecological and evolutionary forces that lead to either phenotypic diversification or stasis, in natural populations. Most of the work in our lab takes advantage of the model organism /Saccharomyces cerevisiae/ (a.k.a. baker’s yeast, brewer’s yeast, or budding yeast). The advantages of working with this species include: a eukaryotic cellular system; an excellent experimental toolkit in genetics, molecular biology, and biochemistry; genome sequences from many strains and related ‘biological’ yeast species, which range in divergence from hundreds to billions of generations; phenotypic traits with implications for human health (yeast is an opportunist pathogen) and agriculture (viniculture). Many fascinating traits with interesting evolutionary patterns have been identified in yeast, because of this rich comparative framework combined with the detailed phenotypic information from this well studied organism. Our goal is to characterize how these traits arose, were maintained or altered over time, and identify the molecular genetic changes that occurred during the evolutionary process.
Typically, work in our lab first involves the identification of genes with interesting patterns of molecular evolution, or interesting phenotypes that are segregating variation among isolates of the same species. Next, we manipulate the genome by either standard genetic crosses or by directly transforming strains to carry mutations observed in other strains, species, or inferred ancestral (ancient) sequences. Finally, we seek to determine the phenotypic effect of these mutations at the molecular level in ecologically relevant environmental conditions. In all, this work involves comparative and population genomics, computational modeling, molecular genetics, biochemistry, classical genetics, and occasionally, field work.
Representative Publications
Schilke B., B.L. Williams, H. Knieszner, S. Pukzta, P. D'Silva, E.A. Craig, and J. Marszalek. 2006. The Evolution of Mitochondrial Chaperones Utilized in Fe-S Cluster Biogenesis. Current Biology. 16:1660-1665.
Rokas A. , B.L. Williams, N. King, and S.B. Carroll. 2003. Genome-scale Approaches to Resolving Incongruence in Molecular Phylogenies. Nature. 425:798-804.
Wittkopp P.J., B.L. Williams, J.E. Selegue, and S.B. Carroll. 2003. Drosophila Pigmentation Evolution: Divergent Genotypes Underlying Convergent Phenotypes. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A. 100(4):1808-1813.
Williams B.L., J. Brawn and K. Paige. 2003. Genetic Effects of Recent Habitat Fragmentation on the Wide Ranging, High Gene Flow Butterfly Speyeria idalia (Nymphalidae). Molecular Ecology. 12(1):11-20.