Why Scientists Care About Yeast

Rutgers’ Marc Gartenberg leads summer laboratory where top geneticists learn what yeast can reveal about human genetics

[image:1:left:40]]For thousands of years, yeast has been used to raise bread dough, ferment wine and brew beer. Each summer for the last 45 years, it has also been used to lure the world’s leading geneticists to a Long Island lab for experiments to unlock the secrets of DNA and further the understanding of how human cells function.

This summer, Marc R. Gartenberg, a faculty member at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School,  is making his third trek to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory to teach “Yeast Genetics & Genomics” alongside colleagues from the University of Toronto and the University of Washington. Yeast, aka Saccharomyces cerevisiae, attracts geneticists because it shares many genes in common with human cells.

Gartenberg, whose expertise lies in microscopy, will manage the course alongside Grant W. Brown, a biochemistry professor at the University of Toronto, who specializes in genomics; and Maitreya Dunham, an associate professor of genome sciences at the University of Washington, whose strength is evolutionary biology.

Participants in the three-week course apply from around the world and include post-doctoral candidates, graduate students and professors who want to integrate yeast into their own lab research. In many respects, Gartenberg said, the instructors are students as well.

“I learned an enormous amount of things in the first year that I did the course,” he said. “There may be little facets of knowledge that you assumed to be true, but then in teaching along other qualified instructors you realize maybe you were misinformed. That kind of stuff percolates out in the year that follows teaching and the number of times that it happened was astonishing. So I got a great education.”

Participants in the course also gain a rare opportunity to rub elbows with leaders in their field.

Guest lecturers this summer will include professors from Princeton, Yale, Duke, Stanford, Brandeis and Harvard Medical School, along with Michael Hampsey, a professor in Rutgers’ Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in the School of Arts and Sciences. Nobel laureates grace the list of past students and the chancellor emeritus of Cold Spring Harbor is James Watson, Nobel Laureate and co-discoverer of the double-helix structure of DNA.

[image:2:right:40]] “I think it’s firmly established as the primary go-to place if someone wants, in a very short period of time, to pick up as much as they can in terms of experimental approaches and techniques in our field,” Gartenberg said. “This is the place people go.”

The course runs a rigorous 16-hour daily schedule full of lectures and experiments that run into the late evenings. On any given day, instructors can find themselves guiding students through 10 different experiments. The results are often fresh discoveries.

Gartenberg was asked if he felt any sense of professional intimidation when first asked to lead a program affiliated with Nobel Prize winners.

“The students are really topnotch, my colleagues were topnotch,” he said. “So was I going to be able to meet the task and teach alongside them? It all worked out.

You have a sense that you have made a difference for the time that you put in, that you actually made a difference in the careers of a lot of people,” he added. “That is a very rewarding thing.”