“Characterization of novel Arabidopsis light signaling mutant BOB.”

Prof. Harmon is researcher at the USDA Plant Gene Expression Center and is also an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology in the College of Natural Resources at UC Berkeley.

Due to their stationary nature, plants are at the mercy of environmental
conditions.  To cope with this vulnerability, plants must sense and
respond to their environment effectively.  How plants tune their
responsiveness to light, a major environmental cue, is poorly understood.
Here, I describe the gene Better Observed Brightness (BOB), which may
mediate plant responses to light.  I show that seedlings lacking BOB are
hypersensitive to light, making BOB an inhibitor of light response in
normal plants.  As an inhibitor of light, it was expected that BOB
over-expression might make blind plants.  However, my results show that
excess BOB is not sufficient to suppress light sensing.  Putatively, BOB
encodes an F-box protein, an annotation that potentially explains these
contradictory results.

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Zhainib is interested in Molecular Toxicology, currently attending City College of San Francisco.  She hopes to transfer to either UC Pharmacy school in San Francisco, or University of California Berkeley.   She chose pharmacy because it is a field that connects the general public to medicine.  Pharmacy also requires interacting with people and advising them with any concerns they might have about taking a certain drug; which she loves.