Grant: CIHR-ICRH Travel Awards - General pool

We are interested in understanding how gene essentiality changes between distantly related species, such as Saccharomyces cerevisiae – budding yeast, Schizosaccharomyces pombe – fission yeast, Caenorhabditis elegans – nematode, and Homo sapiens – humans. Through computational analysis of publicly available datasets of these four species, here we investigate conditional gene essentiality which occurs when a gene is essential for survival in one species but not essential for survival in the other. This conditional gene essentiality between species can be caused by genetic interactions which is an unexpected effect by other genes in the genome. This work aims to understand how gene essentiality is altered by genetic interactions between species which can shed light on human diseases, such as cancers, and potential therapeutic strategies.