Gerald R. Fink

Biography

Whitehead Member Gerry Fink developed baker's yeast as a model for studying the fundamental biology of all organisms. Fink's creative use of classical genetics, biochemistry, and molecular biology has yielded numerous discoveries in biology. His lab has pioneered a better understanding of gene regulation, mutation, and recombination. Topping the list of Fink's seminal contributions to the field was his development of a technique for "transforming" yeast that allowed researchers to introduce a foreign piece of DNA into yeast cells and study the inheritance and expression of that DNA. This technique laid the groundwork for the commercial use of yeast as biological factories for manufacturing vaccines and other drugs and set the stage for similar manipulations in more complex organisms

Research Interest

Fink's discovery of filamentation in yeast uncovered a mechanism by which disease-causing fungi switch from a benign to infectious form and invade human tissues. The analysis of this switch provided the scientific basis for the search for new antibiotics. More recently, Fink used whole genome profiling to identify metabolic pathways responsible for fungal virulence that do not occur in humans and, thus, provide targets for drugs that are specific to pathogenic fungi. He has also identified a genetic mechanism by which pathogenic fungi can quickly alter their outer coatings, or appearance, and thus potentially evade the immune system