Chey Lee

My research involves creating fluorescent reporter assays for measuring retrotransposon mobility in Cryptococcus neoformans and Cryptococcus deneoformans exposed to various stressors. Once the reporters are created, we plan to expand the project to determine how Cryptococcus retrotransposons mobilize in response to the macrophage environment, one of the first lines of defense against Cryptococcal infection. The primary goals of my current research are to create these fluorescent reporters to measure stress-induced transposon mobilization and to investigate transposon mobilization frequency during macrophage infection and potentially in vivo.