Sabeeha Merchant, Editor-in-Chief

Areas of expertise
Chlamydomonas, chloroplast biology, metabolic regulation, transcriptomics, proteomics, micronutrients.
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Sabeeha Merchant is a Professor of Biochemistry and a member of the Molecular Biology Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles. She completed BS and PhD degrees at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and was a Post-doctoral Scholar at Harvard University. She has conducted seminal research on the role of metals in regulating the biosynthesis and assembly of metalloproteins in photosynthetic eukaryotes, and pioneered discoveries in the assembly of metalloenzymes and the regulated biogenesis of major complexes of the photosynthetic apparatus in green algae. At present, the Merchant group uses a combination of classical genetics, genomics and biochemistry to discover mechanisms of trace metal homeostasis in Chlamydomonas. Recent work involves exploiting next generation sequencing technology (RNA-Seq) to define the transcriptome of wild-type and mutant Chlamydomonas strains under various nutrient, environmental, and developmental conditions with the goal of identifying the pattern of expression of every gene in the genome, divining co-expressed genes and key cis-regulatory sequences, and using transcriptome information for genome annotation.
Areas of expertise: Chlamydomonas, chloroplast biology, metabolic regulation, transcriptomics, proteomics, micronutrients.

Editorial experience
Photosynthesis Research, Editorial Board (1995-); Annual Review of Plant Biology, Editor (2003-2018); Eukaryotic Cell, Editor (2003-2013); Trends in Plant Science, Editorial Board (2009-2012); Plant Cell, Co-editor (2002-2004), Editor in Chief (2015-)

Honors and awards include
National Institutes of Health Research Career Development Award; UCLA Faculty Career Development Awards; Guggenheim Foundation Fellow; ASPB Charles Albert Shull Award; UCLA Herbert Newby McCoy Award; AAAS Fellow; ASPB Fellow; NAS Gilbert Morgan Smith Medal; ASPB Charles F. Kettering Award, Humboldt Forschungspreis (Alexander von Humboldt Foundation), Darbaker Prize from the Botanical Society of America, Elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Read more about The Plant Cell Editorial Board here.