Dave Yuan

Dave is an Associate Director, CRISPR Platform at Mammoth Biosciences. Prior to this he worked as a Scientist at Zymergen. As a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Petrov lab (2014-2017), he worked on building and characterizing a large collection of adaptive mutations in yeast in order to gain a more quantitative understanding of adaptation. Using experimental evolution and lineage-tracking molecular barcodes, Dave, in collaboration with the Sherlock and Fisher labs at Stanford and the Desai lab at Harvard, obtained and precisely measured the fitness of adaptive mutations that arose in different physical and genetic (ploidy) environments, with the goal of answering questions on overdominance and pleiotropy. In his PhD work with Trisha Wittkopp at the University of Michigan, he investigated the effects of novel mutations and polymorphisms on expression of a glycolytic gene in yeast in order to understand how the mutational process shapes variation in gene expression and phenotypic evolution. Specifically, he compared the effect sizes of cis- and trans-regulatory mutations, tested for evidence of selection among natural cis-regulatory variation using a mutation spectrum built from the novel mutations, and characterized the impact of genotype-by-environment interaction and epistasis on mutational effect.