Karissa Sanbonmatsu

Karissa Y. Sanbonmatsu is an American structural biologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. She works on the mechanism of non-coding RNA complexes including the ribosome, riboswitches, long non-coding RNAs, as well as chromatin. She was the first to perform an atomistic simulation of the ribosome, determine the secondary structure of an intact lncRNA and to publish a one billion atom simulation of a biomolecular complex.

Education and early career Sanbonmatsu was born in Rochester, New York, the daughter of Joan Loveridge-Sanbonmatsu, and Akira Loveridge-Sanbonmatsu, who are both professors of speech communication in the State University of New York. She attended Oswego High School, and was valedictorian. She won the Pembroke College Stokes Society Scientific Lecture Competition at the University of Cambridge. Sanbonmatsu studied physics at Columbia University, where she used the Very Large Array radio telescope to estimate the distance to supernova remnant G27.4+0.0 and its central X-ray source, which is now known to be a magnetar. Karissa's early research was in plasma physics. She earned her PhD in astrophysical sciences at University of Colorado Boulder under Martin V. Goldman (a student of Donald F. Dubois). Her dissertation entailed analytical treatments of non-linear wave-wave interactions in plasmas, elucidating the competition between Langmuir wave-wave and wave-particle effects in the auroral ionosphere. In 1997, after earning her doctorate, Sanbonmatsu joined Los Alamos National Laboratory as a postdoctoral scholar under Donald F. Dubois (a student of Murray Gell-Mann), determining the effect of kinetic processes on Langmuir waves in plasmas. She became interested in what distinguishes life from matter. In 2002 Los Alamos built Q-machine, one of the world's fastest supercomputer.

Research The Sanbonmatsu Laboratory at Los Alamos National Laboratory was established in 2001. and chromatin. In 2005, Sanbonmatsu was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. At the time, epigenetics was beginning to develop, and Sanbonmatsu realised that RNA could be involved in how genes are turned on and off. It works by controlling the internal triggers that tell a plant to stop flowering, which work in combination with a repressor protein called Flowering Locus C. She went on to look at how the structure of RNA impacted the fate of a cell. She uses illumina dye sequencing for high throughput SHAPE probing.