Principal Investigator Natalie Kuldell
The yeast mitochondria present an insulated compartment within the cell that might be useful for carrying out processes that the nuclear genome can’t encode or support. The mitochondrial genome can be genetically manipulated and my aim is to design a mitochondrial genome that is easy to work with and that can be predictably programmed. To this end, I have built two artificial gene expression systems for yeast mitochondria. One is an in vivo reporter construct based on the cell’s requirement for heme. The second is a gene regulation system that modulates mitochondrial gene expression using guide RNAs with short hairpins and a nuclear RNase redirected to the mitochondria.