Rachel Brem
Associate Professor
Research Description
Over the four billion years that life has evolved on this planet, organisms have acquired amazing phenotypes including natural programs of resistance to stress and disease. The molecular mechanisms underlying these traits are of keen interest in translational applications. That is, if we understand how an organism from the wild has met a challenge that humans face in the clinic, we can borrow the logic for ourselves. The goal of my lab is to accelerate the field’s progress toward this end, by developing methods and discovering principles for evolutionary genetics. We have particular expertise in traits that arose millions of years ago and define a given species as it has divergence from distant relatives. We work at the interface between computation and experiment, and we have a long history of collaboration with organismal biologists working in systems from
single-celled fungi to humans. Recent work has focused on heat tolerance in Taiwanese yeast, cold tolerance in Kenyan nematodes, longevity in North Carolina fruit flies, and immune response in Algerian mice.
Education
- Postdoctoral Fellow, lab of Robert Gentleman, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Institute, 2005-2006. Postdoctoral Fellow, lab of Leonid Kruglyak, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Institute, 2000-2004. Ph.D. in Biophysics, lab of Ken A. Dill, UC San Francisco, September 2000.
Publications
Taekyu Kang, Emily C. Moore, Emily E. K. Kopania, Christina D. King, Birgit 4 Schilling, Judith Campisi, Jeffrey M. Good, and Rachel B. Brem. A natural variation-based screen in mouse cells reveals USF2 as a regulator of the DNA damage response and cellular senescence. G3, in press, 2023.
AlZaben F, Chuong JN, Abrams MB, Brem RB. Joint effects of genes underlying a temperature specialization tradeoff in yeast. PLoS Genetics 17(9):e1009793, 2021.
Wang W, Flury AG, Garrison JL*, Brem RB*. Cold survival and its molecular mechanisms in a locally adapted nematode population. Genome Biology and Evolution 13(9):evab188, 2021. *Co-corresponding author.
Jin K, Wilson KA, Beck JN, Nelson CS, Brownridge GW 3rd, Harrison BR, Djukovic D, Raftery D, Brem RB, Yu S, Drton M, Shojaie A, Kapahi P, Promislow D. Genetic and metabolomic architecture of variation in diet restriction-mediated lifespan extension in Drosophila. PLoS Genetics 16(7):e1008835, 2020.
Wilson KA, Beck JN, Nelson CS, Hilsabeck TA, Promislow D, Brem RB*, Kapahi P*. GWAS for Lifespan and Decline in Climbing Ability in Flies upon Dietary Restriction Reveal decima as a Mediator of Insulin-like Peptide Production. Current Biology 30(14):2749-2760.e3, 2020. *Co-corresponding author.
Hill RZ, Hoffman B, Morita T, Campos SM, Lumpkin EA, Brem RB, Bautista DM. The signaling lipid sphingosine-1-phosphate regulates mechanical pain. eLife 7:e33285, 2018.
Weiss CV, Roop JI*, Hackley RK, Chuong JN, Grigoriev IV, Arkin AP, Skeker JM, Brem RB*. Genetic dissection of interspecific differences in yeast thermotolerance. Nature Genetics 50(11):1501-04, 2018. *Co-
corresponding author.
