Ronald W. Davis

Biography

Ronald W. Davis is Professor of the Department of Genetics. His center develops new technologies to address important biological questions that otherwise would not be feasible.

Research Interest

They are using Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Human to conduct whole genome analysis projects. The yeast genome sequence has approximately 6,000 genes. We have made a set of haploid and diploid strains (21,000) containing a complete deletion of each gene. In order to facilitate whole genome analysis each deletion is molecularly tagged with a unique 20-mer DNA sequence. This sequence acts as a molecular bar code and makes it easy to identify the presence of each deletion. The mixture of all such tag strains then allows for the analysis of the entire genome with the manipulation of a single culture. During growth under a variety of conditions the loss of a tag indicates the loss of a deletion from the population. The concentration of each tag is determined by PCR amplification of the tags and hybridization to an Affymetrix DNA chip that contains the complement to all of the DNA sequence tags. This approach is being applied to other microorganisms.