Ronald Marzan

Past Projects

Ronald, in the past, has worked on multiple lab work. Such as the yEvo lab, where he examined and made his yeast adapt in fungicure media for a total of 7 weeks. Another example being the DNA extraction lab, where he isolated cells and extracted DNA from it. And the strawberry DNA extraction lab, which involved him creating an official protocol to follow in order to extract DNA from strawberries.

Current Projects

Ronald is currently improving essential skills used in labs. Ronald is also working on experiments in the lab such as creating and working with agar plates. He is expecting to work with the yEvo yeast cultures he and others worked with the past year.

Personal

Ronald comes from the Philippines, where he spent his childhood years. Gardening holds a special place as a hobby. While tackling any school challenges, he consistently gives his great effort. Ronald aspires to apply the knowledge gained from his schooling to shape his future career.

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

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”

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