Sabeeha Merchant, a UCLA Distinguished Professor of Biochemistry whose research is providing insights into the complex machinery of the cell, has been elected a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. Founded in 1652, it is one of the world’s oldest academies of science, whose members have included Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, Marie Curie, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Max Planck.
Merchant was the lead author on a three-year, 115-scientist research project published in the Oct. 12, 2007, issue of the journal Science reporting a "gold mine" of data on a tiny green alga called Chlamydomonas, with implications for human diseases. A slimy organism that grows in soil and ponds, the single-celled Chlamydomonas has approximately 15,000 genes, and scientists now know more than 95 percent of the sequence of its genome; several years earlier, they knew less than two percent.
“It’s like having a dictionary of genes,” Merchant, who has studied the green alga for more than 20 years, said at the time. “We know the words, and now we want to learn to talk. Without the dictionary, you would be stuck and couldn’t learn how to speak or write. We went from having a 200-word vocabulary to a 14,250-word vocabulary. Each of us is trying to learn how to put the words and sentences together in our own research programs.
“Having the genome sequence available fast-forwards our research by 10 or 20 years and allows us to make progress by leaps and bounds," she said. "The genome sequence opens the door for us to access all the genes and target our research on subsets of genes. What was just a dream 10 years ago, we have now accomplished.”
The alga turns out to be remarkably complex; its single cell does much of the biochemistry that more complex organisms do, Merchant said.
The Chlamydomonas genome project opened up new directions in Merchant's research program, and she is using “high-throughput genetics, transcriptomics and proteomics to understand fundamental biochemical mechanisms.”
Mechanisms that apply to algae also apply to many other forms of life and other kinds of cells, including those of plants and mammals.
“We study algae to understand how cells work,” Merchant said. “It’s easier to conduct research with a microorganism.”
Merchant was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2012. She was honored with a major award from the National Academy of Sciences in 2006, the Gilbert Morgan Smith Medal, awarded only once every three years, for her exceptional scientific research. Among her many other honors, she has been selected as a Searle Scholar, Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, AAAS Fellow and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Merchant, who joined UCLA’s faculty in 1987, has been awarded research grants from the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Air Force Office of Science Research.
For more on Merchant and her research, visit her website.