Phenotypic diversity can arise from changes in the gene content of the genomes but also from modifications in the regulation of gene expression. The “genetic networks” team compared gene expression in 8 yeast species to find “regulatory outliers”, i.e. conserved genes with special expression profiles compared to their orthologues. The combination of this approach with other functional genomics data (transcriptomics analyses and chromatine immunoprecipitation followed by deep sequencing) led us to identify two genes which are involved in the survival of the human pathogen Candida glabrata upon iron starvation conditions. Iron starvation being a key challenge for C. glabrata survival in blood, this discovery may help us to better understand the invasive strategy of this emerging pathogen.

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