Merchant Lab

Led by Sabeeha Merchant, there are two themes of investigation. The group seeks to understand the dynamics of essential trace-metal – copper, zinc, iron, manganese – metabolism and homeostasis in the reference green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii using state of the art methods including classical genetics, transcriptomics and proteomics, elemental analysis and high-resolution metal imaging. The group also uses comparative genomics to extend the discoveries throughout the green algal lineage. These projects involve genome sequencing and assembly, phylogenomics and bioinformatics.

We are part of the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology and the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at UC Berkeley.