This ROW Career Advancement Award will support sophisticated studies of the mechanism of sporulation in yeast, a model system for genetic studies. The research is directed toward determining how the mating type locus controls sporulation. Preliminary analyses of mutants are encouraging and will be extended, focusing on a particular gene through which the mating type locus acts. This gene is implicated as the central activator of meiosis in diploid cells, and the planned work will attempt to define the effectors of the expression of this gene. This research should help unravel the genetic control of sporulation and meiosis, an important biological process.
