Pamela A. Marshall Laboratory
Pamela A. Marshall is a President's Professor in the School of Mathematical and Natural Sciences in the New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences. To contact her please go to her directory page. To see a list of her research projects, please go to her Research Gate page. To see a full list of publications, please visit her NCBI page or Google Scholar.
We also have been working with mathematicians to study fungal infection and recently have begun collaborations to extend that work into the lab to study herbal extracts and their effects on yeast cells. We have found certain extracts' effects are potentiated with calcium treatment and we are exploring the mechanism of this potentiation.
Extending from our work on the yeast vacuole, we also study calcium homeostasis in yeast, including mathematical modeling of calcium homeostasis. Here's a video about some of the research done in the lab.
Utilizing the Powerful Tools of Yeast Genetics:
The main foci of our research is to utilize Saccharomyces cerevisiae to study several questions in biology. We are interested in the yeast vacuole, roughly equivalent to the mammalian lysosome, and its many functions. The yeast vacuole is an interesting organelle in that it plays important roles in yeast homeostatic mechanisms, including ion and pH balance, but yeast in the lab are able to live without the function of the vacuole. Thus, researchers can generate a wide variety of null and temperature sensitive mutations in yeast to study the physiological impacts of the loss of function in haploid yeast cells. We have studied vacuolar ion and phosphate storage capacity, calcium homeostasis and the role the vacuole plays, and also how yeast try and maintain homeostasis in the absence of a vacuole.
The Marshall lab is located on the West Valley campus of ASU, wholly staffed by creative and industrious undergraduates, where we ask and answer questions about a variety of topics.
If you're interested in undergraduate research, please read this website for how to get started.
