A low-cost cure for CUREs: An undergraduate microbiology course engaging students in authentic research using publicly available datasets.

Undergraduate research experiences are key to preparing STEM students for a range of careers and graduate programs, and to impacting retention in STEM. Providing undergraduate research experiences can be challenging for institutions due to the high cost associated with equipment and reagents, lab space, and research mentors. In this study, we present an upper-level microbiology seminar course that does not require these resources, as each student chooses and performs their own research project using data obtained from publicly available datasets.

Tetraploidy accelerates adaptation under drug selection in a fungal pathogen.

Baseline ploidy significantly impacts evolutionary trajectories and, specifically, tetraploidy is associated with higher rates of adaptation relative to haploidy and diploidy. While the majority of experimental evolution studies investigating ploidy use the budding yeast , the fungal pathogen is a powerful system to investigate ploidy dynamics, particularly in the context of acquiring antifungal drug resistance. laboratory and clinical strains are predominantly diploid, but have been isolated as haploid and polyploid.

The Magnitude of Stress-Induced Genome Instability Results from an Interaction Between Ploidy and Antifungal Drugs.

Organismal ploidy and environmental stress impact the rates and types of mutational events. The opportunistic fungal pathogen , serves as a clinically relevant model for studying the interaction between eukaryotic ploidy and drug-induced mutagenesis. In this study, we compared the rates and types of genome perturbations in diploid and tetraploid following exposure to two different classes of antifungal drugs; azoles and echinocandins.