Tricia R. Serio, Ph.D.

Research

In a variety of systems, proteins have been linked to processes historically limited to nucleic acids, such as infectivity and inheritance. Such proteins, termed prions, adopt multiple physical and therefore functional states in vivo, an attribute underlying their atypical roles in the cell. Our work seeks to elucidate the molecular mechanisms that module prion protein conformational flexibility in vivo using the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae as an experimental model.