Diogo Berjano

I graduated in Biology and received my Master's Degree in Evolutionary and Developmental Biology at the University of Lisbon. My MSc thesis consisted in studying how do factors like the environment of the organism, expression level of a gene and the position of the mutation in said gene shape the fitness landscape of synonymous mutations, using the heat shock protein Hsp90 from S. cerevisiae. Our results showed that synonymous mutations can have extreme effects in organismal fitness and that such effects can be impacted by the environment and, to a lesser extent, expression level of the gene. Such results indicate that synonymous mutations (generally considered neutral) might have a greater role in the standing genetic variance and how it interacts with the environment.