During her graduate studies, Nadia received intensive training in yeast genetics and genomics while researching processes of genomic instability and their phenotypic consequences. She characterized a mechanism of systemic genomic instability in budding yeast that can lead to multiple independent chromosomal rearrangements accumulating over one or a few generations. Nadia was also interested in structural genome variation of industrial yeast strains. In a parallel research project, she investigated the role that genomic heterozygosity plays on the superior industrial traits of a bioethanol yeast strain and showed evidence that it indeed has a substantial impact on two important industrial traits of this strain – growth vigor and heat tolerance. As a postdoc, her broad research interests involve the role that cell-to-cell heterogeneity in genomic instability and gene expression has in promoting transient and permanent resistance to antibiotic treatment in Escherichia coli.
