Michael Springer

Michael Springer

Professor of Systems Biology

Harvard Medical School, Department of Systems Biology
Alpert Building, Room 120
200 Longwood Ave.
Boston, MA 02115
Tel: 617-432-7391
Email: michael_springer@hms.harvard.edu

Website

springerlab.org 
Lab Size: Between 5 and 10

Summary

The Springer lab is interested in how evolution shapes and constrains how organisms respond to their environment. They analyze cellular responses in several related yeast species using a combination of in vivo fluorescence, synthetic and genetic approaches, and numerical and analytical modeling.

While we have a great mechanistic understanding of how the information encoded in DNA is converted through mRNA to protein, we have a limited understanding of the quantitative relationship between genotype and phenotype. We do not know whether properties such as protein abundance are under strong selective constraints and therefore it is difficult to interpret the myriad of changes that are evident between related individuals and species. Using a combination of theoretical, genomic, and proteomic approaches we are exploring in both a high throughput and direct fashion how evolution has changed (comparative evolution), could have changed (synthetic evolution), and does changes (experimental evolution) quantitative features of networks in multiple yeast species under different selective regimes.

Publications

Springer M, Weissman JS, Kirschner MW. A general lack of compensation for gene dosage in yeast. Mol Syst Biol. 2010 May 11;6:368. PMID: 20461075

DeLuna A, Springer M, Kirschner MW, Kishony R. Need-based up-regulation of protein levels in response to deletion of their duplicate genes. PLoS Biol. 2010 Mar 30;8(3):e1000347. PMID: 20361019.

Singh S*, Springer M* , Steen J, Kirschner M, Steen H,. FLEXIQuant: A novel tool for the absolute quantification of proteins , and the simultaneous identification and quantification of modified peptides. Journal of Proteome Research 2009 8 May; (5) 2201-10.