"Sabeeha has blazed new pathways that have allowed us to better understand how organisms take advantage of metal ions to create useful energy for biosynthesis," said Steven Clarke, UCLA professor of chemistry and biochemistry, and director of UCLA's Molecular Biology Institute. "Most importantly, she has demonstrated the plasticity that organisms can use to substitute one metal for another when environmental conditions are altered. She has shown that this molecular flexibility is crucial for maintaining life when the outside world changes."
Merchant, who joined UCLA's faculty in 1987, was a postdoctoral scholar at Harvard in the mid-1980s, conducting molecular biology research, when she learned of a mystery that she wanted to solve. Copper is an essential nutrient, for humans as well as plants where copper is required for photosynthesis, and Merchant was surprised to read a research paper showing that algae could grow without copper.
"The algae made a back-up iron-containing protein that served the same function as the copper protein," Merchant said. "If you give them copper, they will use it, but if you take the copper away, they figure out a way around it. Many species of algae can do this switch. Somehow the algae know how much copper is present, but how do they know? They must have a way of measuring the copper; there must be an unknown mechanism; I wanted to learn what that mechanism is and how it works."
She started to conduct research at the molecular level, and over the years, she has largely succeeded in solving this m
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Contact: Stuart Wolpert
swolpert@support.ucla.edu
310-206-0511
University of California - Los Angeles
10-Feb-2006