Yeast Cells Help In Study Of Diseases

Nov 15, 2016 By Paul Cobine
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The research in my laboratory focuses on how cells get the necessary components to grow.

We need many things food, water are most important but also sometimes you will need to have a vitamins tablets to help you grow.

In these vitamin tablets are many things but one is copper. The same copper that is used in electronics and jewelry is used in your cells to help you survive.

So if all human cells need copper, how do they get it and how does copper get to where it needs to be in cells. If humans don't get enough copper or have a condition that changes the levels of copper, we get diseases.

So to study these diseases, we use baker’s yeast, an organism that we can easily and safely grow in the laboratory that acts almost exactly like a human cell. By growing the yeast under different conditions we can tell why a human might be sick. 

Then we use biochemistry to find the exact problem so that we can discover how to fix the problem. So the microbes that we use to make bread can tell us how to fix major health problems!!