At the YEAST2025 conference in Paris (July 21–24, 2025), Lucía Ramos-Alonso presented her research.

At the YEAST2025 conference in Paris (July 21–24, 2025), Lucía Ramos-Alonso, postdoctoral researcher in the EGE-DtoP group (Eukaryotic Gene Expression: from DNA to Protein), presented her research in an oral session entitled “Decoupling cell volume and rDNA repeat copy number in RNA Pol I regulation.”

In Saccharomyces cerevisiae, RNA polymerase I (Pol I) produces 35S rRNA pre-mRNA, further processed to obtain the 25S, 18S and 5,8S rRNAs. Larger cells usually keep rRNA levels constant by increasing rDNA copy number. In this talk, Ramos-Alonso showed that in enlarged mutant cells unable to expand rDNA repeats, rRNA synthesis rates remain stable. The mutant achieves this balance due to an increase in the rate of RNA Pol I elongation, revealing an alternative strategy to sustain ribosome biogenesis independently of rDNA repeat number.