Joshua Bayes

     Josh grew up outside the small town of Carey, Ohio. Nipping at his tail are two siblings: a 23-year-old sister in a psychology masters program at Wright State University and a 16-year-old brother weathering out high school. Josh shed the simple, pastoral life when he moved to Cleveland to get his undergraduate degree in Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics at John Carroll University. There he got his scientific feet wet in an on-campus lab with Dr. Jim Lissemore and began to tread water on his own in Dr. George Stark's lab at the Cleveland Clinic. He graduated in 2001, moved to Boston to do some house renovations for a summer, and eventually stayed in Boston working as a lab technician in the lab of Dr. Alan Michelson at Brigham & Women's Hospital. Always knowing that he had a mutual friendship with Drosophila melanogaster through their love of wine, Josh had only come to appreciate the little guys after his couple year stint in Alan's lab. In 2003, Josh relocated across the country to the other end of Interstate 90 for his Ph.D. studies in the Molecular and Cellular Biology Program at the University of Washington under the care and mentoring of Dr. Harmit Malik at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

For the past few years in the lab, Josh has been gazing out his first floor window overlooking Lake Union pondering such questions as: How has genetic conflict shaped the centromeres of plants and animals? Can centromere conflict explain the rapid evolution of centromere and heterochromatin proteins? And, finally, is the concerted evolution of centromeric sequence and proteins an explanation for inter-species hybrid sterility? Through a series of competition experiments in D. melanogaster, Josh has used the variability of the Responder pericentric repeat to test how centromere size can distort chromosome inheritance. He has also used population genetics analysis to characterize the positive selection affecting a group of centromere and heterochromatin proteins. Currently, he is busy determining the functional consequences of the observed protein divergence with a combination of transgenic, cytological, and biochemical experiments.

Outside the lab, Josh works out most of his energy by running or playing some basketball. When the weather forecast is thumbs-up, he likes to get out for some backpacking or day-hiking. Otherwise, he can be spotted around the city seeing a film, socializing at the nearest watering hole, catching some live music, or just reading in the park.

Publications

1. Talbert PB, Bayes JJ and Henikoff S. (In press) Evolution of Centromeres and Kinetochores: A Two-Part Fugue. In "The Kinetochore: from Molecular Discoveries to Cancer Therapy". Eds. De Wulf P., and Earnshaw W.C. Springer Publ. New York.
   
2. Lissemore JL, Bayes J, Calvey M, Reineke L, Colagiavanni A, Tscheiner M, and Mascotti DP. (2008) Green fluorescent protein is superior to blue fluorescent protein as a quantitative reporter of promoter activity in E. coli. Mol Biol Rep 13 Jul [DOI:10.1007/s11033-008-9285-5]. PDF file KB
   
3. Bayes JJ, and Malik, HS. The Evolution of Centromeric DNA Sequences (2008) advanced Standard Article Copyright © John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1002/9780470015902.a0020827 Article Online Posting Date: April 30, 2008 PDF file 419 KB
   
4. Rodriguez MA,* Vermaak D,* Bayes JJ,* and Malik, HS. Species-specific positive selection of the male-specific lethal complex that participates in dosage compensation in Drosophila.(2007) Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 104(39): 15412-7.(*contributed equally)
   
5. Malik, H. and Bayes J. Genetic conflicts during meiosis and the evolutionary origins of centromere complexity. (2006) Biochem Soc Trans 34(Pt 4): 569-73 PDF file 172 KB
   
6. Nguyen H, Chatterjee-Kishore M, Jiang Z, Qing Y, Ramana CV, Bayes J, Commane M, Li X, Stark GR. IRAK-dependent phosphorylation of Stat1 on serine 727 in response to interleukin-1 and effects on gene expression. (2003). J Interferon Cytokine Res. 23(4): 183-92. PDF file 487 KB
   
7. Nguyen H, Ramana CV, Bayes J, Stark GR. Roles of phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase in interferon-gamma-dependent phosphorylation of STAT1 on serine 727 and activation of gene expression. (2001). J Biol Chem. 276(36): 33361-8. PDF file 345 KB