Eirini Christodoulaki

University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna | vetmed · Institut für Populationsgenetik

Zinc is the second most prevalent metal element present in living organisms, and control of its concentration is pivotal to physiology. The amount of zinc available to the cell cytoplasm is regulated by the activity of members of the SLC39 family, the ZIP proteins. Selectivity of ZIP transporters has been the focus of earlier studies which provided...

Background Pleiotropy describes the phenomenon in which a gene affects multiple phenotypes. The extent of pleiotropy is still disputed, mainly because of issues of inadequate power of analyses. A further challenge is that empirical tests of pleiotropy are restricted to a small subset of all possible phenotypes. To overcome these limitations, we pro...

Excitatory amino acid transporters (EAAT/SLC1) mediate Na+-dependent uptake of extracellular glutamate and are potential drug targets for neurological disorders. Conventional methods to assess glutamate transport in vitro are based on radiolabels, fluorescent dyes or electrophysiology, which potentially compromise the cell’s physiology and are gene...

Polygenic adaptation is frequently associated with small allele frequency changes of many loci. Recent works suggest, that large allele frequency changes can be also expected. Laboratory natural selection (LNS) experiments provide an excellent experimental framework to study the adaptive architecture under controlled laboratory conditions: time ser...