Lufeng Dan
Yeast geneticist at Chengdu University who studies reversible mutations that let cells switch drug resistance on and off, using rapamycin resistance in fission yeast as the model
School of Pharmacy and Antibiotics Innovation and Resistance Control Key Laboratory of Sichuan Province, Chengdu University (PubMed affiliation 2025–2026) · Life Sciences Institute, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou (Xiangwei He lab, PubMed affiliation 2021)
Fission yeast is a single-celled fungus used to study how cells control growth. Its TORC1 complex is the yeast version of mTORC1, the growth-control complex, and it can be blocked with rapamycin plus caffeine. Lufeng Dan is first author of the 2026 Microbiology Spectrum study in this Atlas (DAN2026). Some yeast cells became resistant to the drugs, then lost the resistance again a few generations later. The team showed that this was not an epigenetic switch. Mutations that broke the gaf1 gene appeared under drug pressure and then reverted to the normal DNA sequence when the drug was gone. Gaf1 is a GATA transcription factor that slows growth downstream of TORC1. The authors warn that such hidden switches can quietly change laboratory yeast stocks.
The paper continues a line of work Dan began at the Life Sciences Institute of Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, in the group of Xiangwei He. A 2021 PNAS paper with Dan as first author found drug-resistance mutations in fission yeast that are made by short tandem duplications of DNA and then flip back to the original sequence, and used deep genome sequencing to find thousands of such duplications in a single population.
By 2025 Dan was at the School of Pharmacy of Chengdu University, where a paper in the Chinese journal Hereditas described a screen that isolated 14 yeast strains with unstable rapamycin resistance, again with Xiangwei He as a co-author.
Milestones in the Atlas
A selection, not a full bibliography: only papers that meet the Atlas inclusion criteria.
| Year | Evidence | Study |
|---|---|---|
| 2026 | M | Recurrent reversible mutations at gaf1 driving metastable TORC1 inhibitor resistance in fission yeast. DAN2026 First author: showed that on-and-off resistance to TORC1 inhibitors in fission yeast comes from reversible mutations in gaf1. |
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