Alan Bakalinsky

Dr. Bakalinsky serves as Director of Research at Gadusol Laboratories. He most recently was an Associate Professor at the Department of Food Science and Technology at Oregon State University. He is also Adjunct Associate Professor in the Departments of Microbiology and Biochemistry/Biophysics at Oregon State University. Dr. Bakalinsky’s research focuses on the physiology of yeast fermentation. He has published 45 peer-reviewed articles, including a recent eLife paper that describes the discovery of the gadusol biosynthetic gene cluster and its heterologous expression in yeast. His early work focused on a widely-exploited but poorly understood trait of wine strains of Saccharomyces cerevisiae—resistance to sulfite. His genetic and molecular genetic analysis discovered a novel sulfite efflux pump and a control mechanism that accounted for the resistance. His more recent work has focused on cellulosic ethanol and the physiology of acid stress. His key contribution was documenting a general sensitivity towards acid stress shared by auxotrophs which explains why repeated screens of widely-used mutant libraries have not generated highly-resistant strains.