Desai Lab
Principal Investigator: Michael M Desai
Institution: Harvard University (Cambridge, MA)
Primary Subfield: Genetics/Genomics
Recruitment Status: ✅ Hiring Postdocs
Research Focus
PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT The overall goal of my research program is to understand evolution in microbial populations, using a combination of mathematical models and laboratory evolution experiments in budding yeast. Here, we aim to pursue this overall goal by characterizing the statistical structure of complex and high-dimensional genotype- phenotype landscapes, and by analyzing how microbial and viral populations evolve across these landscapes. In the short term, evolution depends primarily on the most immediate aspect of the landscape: the distribution of fitness effects of individual mutations. However, on longer timescales interactions between the effects of multiple mutations (epistasis) can be crucial. Similarly, mutations often have different fitness effects in different environments (pleiotropy). This is essential to evolution in fluctuating environments. Recent work shows that epistasis and pleiotropy are strong and common among specific sets of mutations in many microbial systems. However, these studies of specific limited sets of mutations cannot fully explain how epistasis and pleiotropy constrain the rate, repeatability, or dynamics of adaptation. And even given a comp…
Active NIH Awards
- 1R35GM161612-01: Evolution and population genetics in microbial populations (2026)
- 5R01GM104239-13: Microbial Adaptation and the Statistics of Epistasis and Pleiotropy (2025)
- 5R01GM104239-12: Microbial Adaptation and the Statistics of Epistasis and Pleiotropy (2024)
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