Weiyue Ji

Cancer therapy has traditionally focused on eliminating fast-growing populations of cells. Yet, an increasing body of evidence suggests that small subpopulations of cancer cells can evade strong selective drug pressure by entering a 'persister' state of negligible growth. This drug-tolerant state has been hypothesized to be part of an initial strategy towards eventual acquisition of bona fide drug-resistance mechanisms. However, the diversity of drug-resistance mechanisms that can expand from a persister bottleneck is unknown. Here we compare persister-derived, erlotinib-resistant colonies that arose from a single, EGFR-addicted lung cancer cell. We find, using a combination of large-scale drug screening and whole-exome sequencing, that our erlotinib-resistant colonies acquired diverse resistance mechanisms, including the most commonly observed clinical resistance mechanisms. Thus, the drug-tolerant persister state does not limit--and may even provide a latent reservoir of cells for--the emergence of heterogeneous drug-resistance mechanisms.

Ubiquitin is essential for eukaryotic life and varies in only 3 amino acid positions between yeast and humans. However, recent deep sequencing studies indicate that ubiquitin is highly tolerant to single mutations. We hypothesized that this tolerance would be reduced by chemically induced physiologic perturbations. To test this hypothesis, a class of first year UCSF graduate students employed deep mutational scanning to determine the fitness landscape of all possible single residue mutations in the presence of five different small molecule perturbations. These perturbations uncover 'shared sensitized positions' localized to areas around the hydrophobic patch and the C-terminus. In addition, we identified perturbation specific effects such as a sensitization of His68 in HU and a tolerance to mutation at Lys63 in DTT. Our data show how chemical stresses can reduce buffering effects in the ubiquitin proteasome system. Finally, this study demonstrates the potential of lab-based interdisciplinary graduate curriculum.

Halomonas strain TD01, a newly identified halophilic bacterium, has proven to be a promising low-cost host for the production of chemicals. However, genetic manipulation in Halomonas sp. is still difficult due to the lack of well-characterized and tunable expression systems. In this study, a systematic, efficient method was exploited to construct both a constitutive promoter library and inducible promoters. Porin, a highly expressed protein in Halomonas TD01, was first identified from the Halomonas TD01 proteome. Subsequent study of the intergenic region upstream of porin led to the identification of a core promoter region, including -10 and -35 elements. By randomizing the sequence between the -35 and -10 elements, a constitutive promoter library was obtained with 310-fold variation in transcriptional activity; an inducible promoter with a >200-fold induction was built by integrating a lac operator into the core promoter region. As two complementary expression systems, the constitutive and inducible promoters were then employed to regulate the biosynthetic pathway of poly-3-hydroxybutyrate (PHB) in Halomonas TD01, demonstrating the usefulness of the expression systems, furthermore, they could be applied in future metabolic engineering of Halomonas TD strains, and the systematic method used in this study can be generalized to other less-characterized bacterial strains.

In microbial communities, bacterial populations are commonly controlled using indiscriminate, broad range antibiotics. There are few ways to target specific strains effectively without disrupting the entire microbiome and local environment. Here, we use conjugation, a natural DNA horizontal transfer process among bacterial species, to deliver an engineered CRISPR interference (CRISPRi) system for targeting specific genes in recipient Escherichia coli cells. We show that delivery of the CRISPRi system is successful and can specifically repress a reporter gene in recipient cells, thereby establishing a new tool for gene regulation across bacterial cells and potentially for bacterial population control.