Stephen Oliver PhD

Dr. Steve Oliver, Ph.D. started to work on yeast as a graduate student and have studied it ever since, with occasional excursions into the filamentous fungi and even Streptomyces bacteria. The yeast genome-sequencing project was initiated in Steve Oliver's lab in the mid-1980s when we started to sequence chromosome III. This turned into a major European Project, which eventually led to the sequencing of the entire yeast genome. Steve Oliver then took up the challenge presented by all the genes of unknown function revealed by the genome sequence, leading the EURO FAN Consortium that pioneered many of the ‘omic and other high-throughput technologies in current use.

Steve Oliver's lab is dedicated to unraveling the workings of the yeast cell, using both top-down and bottom-up systems biology strategies. We are also concerned with developing yeasts as systems to both understand and combat human diseases, including through the use of automated (‘Robot Scientist’ methods in collaboration with Ross King’s group in Aberystwyth).

Finally, we take an interest, at both the bioinformatics and experimental levels, in the evolution of genomes and networks, and are starting to apply this to mammalian systems.