Elaine M. Tobin

Early life and education Elaine Munsey was born in Louisville, Kentucky on December 23, 1944.

She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree from Oberlin College in 1966, majoring in chemistry.

Career In 1973 Tobin went to Brandeis University, where she did postdoctoral work with Attila Klein, on the influence of light on the development of plants. In 1975 she was hired in the Biology Department at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Support was sparse, but she was able to get funding for basic research on plants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). She was able to obtain laboratory space previously used by retiring professor Karl Hamner.

As a student with Winslow Briggs, Tobin had been introduced to the effects of phytochrome on flowering and to the work of Karl Hamner on circadian rhythms and flowering.

Tobin first used Lemna gibba (duckweed) and later Arabidopsis thaliana (cress) as model plant systems to study light regulation of gene expression in plants, examining interactions between phytochrome photoreceptors, genes, and circadian rhythms. Tobin's group also demonstrated phytochrome regulation of LHCB proteins (also known as cab genes) in Arabidopsis. By growing duckweed heterotrophically in the dark, and exposing it briefly to red and far-red light, Tobin demonstrated the effects of phytochromes on plant growth and transcription in rcbs genes.

In a series of experiments beginning in 1993, Tobin's lab described DNA-binding activity with an affinity for LHCB in plant cells. Using a DNA fragment, they screened the Arabidopsis expression library, and cloned a protein with relevant binding activity, which they named CCA1. They showed that Circadian Clock Associated 1 (CCA1) was necessary for phytochrome response in Arabidopsis thaliana. Reports on the activity of CCA1 and a closely related gene (LHY) from George Coupland were submitted together to Cell in 1998. Among many other studies of the regulation and function of CCA1, Tobin has determined that one method of clock regulation involves the phosphorylation of CCA1 by the protein kinase CK2.

Elaine M. Tobin retired from teaching in 2014.

Selected research