Gaowen Liu
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gaowen.bsky.social
Gaowen Liu
@gaowen.bsky.social
21 followers 48 following 5 posts
PI in SIAT, big fan of yeast genome evolution research
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Reposted by Gaowen Liu
sophiemartinlab.bsky.social
Super excited that this story by @borissieber.bsky.social is now on BioRxiv!

For decades, we thought there was no MAPK scaffold for the ERK-like cascade that promotes sexual reproduction in fission yeast ... until Boris found it !

See the thread 👇 and enjoy the paper!

doi.org/10.1101/2025...
borissieber.bsky.social Boris Sieber @borissieber.bsky.social · Sep 25
Mammalian cells have KSR, budding yeast has Ste5… and fission yeast has Sms1 as the MAPK scaffold for sexual reproduction!

Very excited to share my postdoc work where we discover that the hemi-arrestin Sms1 binds all components of the MAPK cascade, including ERK-like Spk1

doi.org/10.1101/2025...
Schematic of MAPK signalling in fission yeast, budding yeast and Metazoa. No MAPK scaffold was known for ERK-like MAPK in fission yeast, as opposed to budding yeast Ste5 and metazoan KSR1/2.
September 25, 2025 at 7:48 PM
gaowen.bsky.social
Sex or growth? Life must continually balance these strategies. We forced yeast to choose and captured the trade-off in real time. Evolution rewired existing regulators and fixed them through genetic assimilation, creating specialists for sex at the cost of growth.
www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...
Sex or growth? Life must continually balance these strategies. We forced yeast to choose and captured the trade-off in real time. Evolution rewired existing regulators and fixed them through genetic assimilation, creating specialists for sex at the cost of growth. https://www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/short/2025.09.26.678705v1 Thrilled to finally share this seven-year story—a journey that began during my postdoc in Sophie’s lab and continued for four more years as I built my own lab in Shenzhen.
September 28, 2025 at 12:30 PM