Liam Glanville

Past Projects

Last year Liam took “intro to biotech” at Foster High School. A lab he worked on in that class was the yEVO yeast counting competition. This was our biggest project of the year. In this project he grew his own yeast colony, competing with my classmates to see who could get the best growth while using either caffeine, sodium bicarbonate or fungicure. Liam used sodium bicarbonate, and while he didn’t win, he had good results.

Current Projects

Currently Liam is taking “advanced biomedical sciences”. The class is currently working with agarose gels to measure DNA. Currently we are working on Activity 4.E, where he is trying to determine the sizes of the DNA samples in a forensic DNA fingerprinting activity. Next he will be working on an extension activity in chapter four to analyze similar colored candy to determine if they use the same food dyes.

Personal

When Liam is not at school he enjoys playing basketball, running, and swimming. He was born in Seattle WA.

Experimental evolution of S. cerevisiae for caffeine tolerance alters multidrug resistance and TOR signaling pathways

Renee C. Geck, Naomi G. Moresi, Leah M. Anderson, yEvo Students, Rebecca Brewer, Timothy R. Renz, M. Bryce Taylor, Maitreya J. Dunham

G3, 2024, 14(9), jkae148; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.04.28.591555

Summary:

Yeast can adapt to grow in high concentrations of caffeine. In collaboration with high school students, we grew yeast in increasing concentrations of caffeine to select for ones better adapted to caffeine. We sequenced these yeast to identify mutations that promote growth in caffeine, and showed they are related to pumping caffeine out of the cell, or changing pathways within the cell that are otherwise blocked by caffeine.

Complete Paper is available on the on the G3 - Genes, Genomes, Genetics website and is titled “Experimental evolution of S. cerevisiae for caffeine tolerance alters multidrug resistance and TOR signaling pathways”

Publications

Experimental evolution of S. cerevisiae for caffeine tolerance alters multidrug resistance and TOR signaling pathways

Renee C. Geck, Naomi G. Moresi, Leah M. Anderson, yEvo Students, Rebecca Brewer, Timothy R. Renz, M. Bryce Taylor, Maitreya J. Dunham

bioRxiv 2024.04.28.591555; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.04.28.591555

Summary:

Yeast can adapt to grow in high concentrations of caffeine. In collaboration with high school students, we grew yeast in increasing concentrations of caffeine to select for ones better adapted to caffeine. We sequenced these yeast to identify mutations that promote growth in caffeine, and showed they are related to pumping caffeine out of the cell, or changing pathways within the cell that are otherwise blocked by caffeine.

Complete Paper is available on the on the bioRxiv preprint server for Biology and is titled “Experimental evolution of S. cerevisiae for caffeine tolerance alters multidrug resistance and TOR signaling pathways”

Experimental evolution of caffeine-tolerant yeast alters multidrug resistance and PP2A-like signaling pathways

We successfully evolved caffeine-tolerant clones in collaboration with high school classrooms using our yEvo protocol. The most commonly observed mutations corroborate previous findings that yeast evolved to have increased caffeine tolerance acquire different mutations than the mutation profile from other selective pressures like azole drugs.

Research completed under the guidance of Dr. Renee C. Geck of the Dunham Lab by Foster High School's Intro to Biotech class as part of the yEvo project 2022-2023 School year.

230720_PNWYC_Geck_poster.pdf