Heitman Lab Members

Lydia Chen Undergraduate Student Spring Semester Abroad, Madrid Phone: 919.684.2809 Fax: 919.684.5458 Email: lydia.chen@duke.edu

I am an undergraduate Duke student in the class of 2009 majoring in biology and Spanish. I began working in Dr. Heitman's lab in April 2006 under the guidance of Dr. Chaoyang Xue. I worked on two projects, the first one involving a mutant library screen and the second one involving a glucose sensor. I screened approximately 2700 strains in an agrobacterium-mediated mutagenesis library provided by Dr. Alex Idnurm. My goal was to identify inositol insensitive mutants by monitoring the mating filamentation of the strains on MS+200mm inositol media. I also did a functional study of the glucose sensing homologs Snf3 and Rgt2 in Cryptococcus neoformans. I created knockout strains in order to study the phenotype of these mutants.