Murray Lab | Murray Lab
budding yeast, using experimental evolution, genetic analysis, synthetic biology, and cell biology. We try to make quantitative measurements that discriminate amongst different classes of models. Members of the lab come from both biology and physics backgrounds. How does biological novelty evolve? Because we lack time travel, this process is difficult to study in nature, and we therefore apply selective pressure in the laboratory. We have evolved multicellularity, altered mating preferences, circadian oscillators, genetic instability, and new connections between signaling pathways and have developed methods to find the mutations that cause these new phenotypes. We are interested both in general questions about what determines evolutionary trajectories and the specific mechanisms that organisms invent to produce novel traits. How do cells accomplish specific tasks and how did these solutions evolve? We follow the Feynman principle of “What I cannot create, I cannot understand” by engine