Sabeeha Merchant

Sabeeha Sabanali Merchant (born 1959) is a professor of plant biology at the University of California, Berkeley. She studies the photosynthetic metabolism and metalloenzymes In 2010 Merchant led the team that sequenced the Chlamydomonas genome. She was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2012.

Early life and education Merchant was born in Mumbai. Merchant scored well in the science and the humanities, but was selected for the sciences as there were not enough girls in the class. At the age of fifteen, Merchant started university at St. Xavier's College, where she was one of five women in a class of 300. She relocated to the United States. She joined the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1978 and became interested in the chemistry of living cells whilst working under the supervision of Glenn Chambliss. She worked alongside Bruce Selman on the single-cell alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. Chlamydomonas reinhardtii is a model organism as it can build the relevant systems for photosynthesis in the absence of light. During her doctorate Merchant purified chloroplast coupling factor 1, a component of the pathway that uses ATP synthase to synthesize adenosine triphosphate.

Research and career After completing her PhD, Merchant joined Lawrence Bogorad at Harvard University. She started working on light-regulated gene expression. Merchant showed that the RNA of cytochrome c6, an iron-based protein, is only present in copper deficient cells. She showed that chlamydomonas also contained cytochrome c6, which could step in during photosynthesis if needed. She discovered that the regulator for plastocyanin and cytochrome c regulation was CRR1 (Copper Response Regulator). She worked with Todd Yeates on the structure and genetics of plastocyanin and cytochrome c, uncovering the crystal structures of both proteins. She was awarded the National Academy of Sciences Gilbert Morgan Smith Medal for her contributions to the assembly of metalloenzymes. In 2007 she led a team that sequenced the Chlamydomonas genome. Her inaugural article was published in PNAS in 2009. She spent 2012 on a sabbatical at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology. She was appointed director of the Institute for Genomics and Proteomics at UCLA in 2014. She also served on the Life Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize in 2017.

Merchant moved to the University of California, Berkeley in 2018. At Berkeley, she is a Professor of Plant and Microbial Biology. Her lab continue to investigate the metabolism of iron and copper, as well as comparative genomics of algae and bioenergy. and was editor-in-chief of The Plant Cell from 2015-2019. She serves on the Board of Directors of Annual Reviews.

Awards and honors Her awards and honors include;

1999 American Society of Plant Biologists Charles Albert Shull Award 2004 University of California, Los Angeles Herbert Newby McCoy Award 2005 Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science 2008 Fellow of the American Society of Plant Biologists 2006 Gilbert Morgan Smith Medal 2012 Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Humboldt Award 2012 Elected to the National Academy of Sciences 2012, Darbaker Prize, Botanical Society of America 2014 Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 2016 Elected to the Academy of Sciences Leopoldina Recognized as a Pioneer Member of the American Society of Plant Biologists.