Duccio Cavalieri’s group is involved in the application of genomics approaches to study population genetics and the evolution of transcriptional regulatory networks. In particular his group has been studying the mechanism of action, cellular adaptation and resistance to naturally occurring stressors in yeast, and adaptation/resistance to anti-cancer molecules in human cells. The group has multidisciplinary competences focusing both biology and technology development. The technology interest focuses on development microarrays to detect allele specific regulation of expression and bioinformatic methods to interpret genomics data in the context of cellular pathways and regulatory networks. The Cavalieri’s group has a large experience on DNA-microarrays. Upon expanding his research from population genetics to ecological-genomics, Dr. Cavalieri has recently obtained promising results in studies investigating yeast’s ability to adapt to stresses found in its natural environment, such as temperature, acetic acid and nitrogen starvation. Understanding mechanisms evolved in wine yeasts to adapt to environmental stresses will likely prove important in understanding strategies that mammalian cells use to resist to small molecules and chemotherapeutic agents. These studies are now moving from strains of the S.cerevisiae species to the analysis of the regulatory networks associated to hybrid vigour in hybrids of the species S.cerevisiae and S.bayanus. The Cavalieri’s group is also interested in using yeast as a model organism in nutrigenomics and toxicogenomics studies involving the regulation of glycolysis in different organism and the response to resveratrol and phenolic compounds present in wine, with the aim to generalize results and technologies developed in yeast to mammals. In this direction Cavalieri’s group is also applying genome-wide approaches to the investigation of the interaction between the immune system cells and yeast, in particular for the reconstruction of metabolic pathways in dendritic cells and in the study of interaction between yeasts and mammalian cells. The Cavalieri’s lab is currently located in the Department of pharmacology of Florence University, (http://www.pharm.unifi.it). The department of pharmacology has a well established tradition in studies on general pharmacology and toxicology, on humans, animal models and cell systems. The Department has up-to date facilities for molecular and cell biology, an advanced Mass Spectrometry Unit (C.I.S.M.) and a recently established microarray facility. The department has an excellent publication record in these fields and has a dynamic interdisciplinary research interaction and with other research departments, such as Statistics, Chemistry and Physics and with the main regional research hospital, which facilitate basic research and its application to human health. Presently, the department hosts several European Integrated Projects and two European Networks of Excellence NUGO, Networks of excellence in Nutrigenomics (NUGO, www.nugo.org), and DC Thera (Dendritic Cells fro Novel Immunotherapies, http://www.dc-thera.org/index.php), in which the Cavalieri’s group is heavily involved. The department also hosts the first of the CORE Laboratories of the Istituto Toscano Tumori, led by Lucio Luzzatto, of which the Cavalieri’s lab is one of the first members. (http://www.sanita.toscana.it/sst/itt/istituto-toscano-tumori.shtml). Duccio Cavalieri is closely and actively collaborating with several scientists from Harvard University, in particular with the (Bauer Center for Genomics Research http://www.cgr.harvard.edu, http://www.cgr.harvard.edu/fellows_pages/cavalieri.html) where he has spent 5 years of his career, and with the group Daniel Hartl at OEB, (http://www.oeb.harvard.edu/hartl/lab/), (Andrew Murray at MCB http://www.mcb.harvard.edu/Faculty/Murray.html), and with Mike Resnick at NIEHS (http://dir.niehs.nih.gov/dirlmg/cs/home.htm).        Five selected publications: Cavalieri D, De Filippo C. (2005) Bioinformatic methods for integrating whole-genome expression results into cellular networks. Drug Discov Today. May 15;10(10):727-34. Kandror O., Bretschneider N., Evgenj Kreydin, Cavalieri D., Goldberg A.L. (2004). Production of threalose and certain heat shock proteins occurs as part of a new adaptative response in yeast that enhances viability at 0 centigrades and upon freezing. Molecular Cell, 13, 771-781. Townsend, J.P., Cavalieri, D., Hartl, D.L. Population Genetic Variation in Global Gene Expression. (2003) Mol. Biol. Evol. 20: 955-963. Grosu P., Townsend J.P., Hartl D.L., and Cavalieri D., Pathway Processor: a tool for integrating whole-genome expression results into metabolic networks. Genome Res. Jul;12(7):1121-6. (2002). Cavalieri, D., Townsend, J. P. & Hartl, D. L. (2000) Manifold anomalies in gene expression in a vineyard isolate of Saccharomyces cerevisiae revealed by DNA microarray analysis. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA.; 97:12369-12374.