Sonia with her poster and the Merchant Lab at the Photosynthesis conference!

Congrats to our postdoc Jon Lin for receiving the F32 NIH Fellowship for the Human Milk Fat project, where he is genetically engineering the green algae Auxenochlorella to produce a healthy and sustainable human milk fat substitute in baby formula.

Join us for the 2024 Mitochondria and Chloroplasts Gordon Research Seminar in Spain! Don't miss this wonderful opportunity to present your early career research🌱🦠 Register by March 31st to be considered for an oral presentation.

Are you interested in a post-doctoral position at UC Berkeley’s Institute of Quantitative Biosciences? Consider applying to the Merchant Lab for our projects in nutritional Cu signaling and Gene targeting in algae! Check out our flyer for more information.

Are you taking a gap year before grad school? Consider joining the Merchant Lab at UC Berkeley’s Institute of Quantitative Biosciences for our projects in symbiosis between algae and bacteria and gene targeting in algae! Check out this flyer for more information.

Great talk today at the DOE conference in Washington DC! Sabeeha showed off the Auxenohlorella system and its synthetic biology application and Marco also did a poster showcasing the mechanism of algal polycistronic expression. Check out these pictures of their work:

Welcome Lauren Saucedo, who will be joining us as a Research Assistant working on the genetic engineering of electron transport proteins in Auxenochlorella protothecoides to reduce algal dependence on Cu to increase photosynthetic productivity. We're excited to have her here!

We are jumping for joy that three former and current Merchant Lab trainees (Julianne, Jordan , and Jude) just got the @NSFGRFP. We’re not jesting! We’re just jazzed!

Sabeeha and our former postdoc Mugi Tsednee at the annual ASPB Plant Biology 2024! It’s great to see our alumni doing amazing things.

Sabeeha at Photon Systems Instruments booth with Zuzana. Great new products at ASPB plant biology 2024!

Sabeeha and Neelima at ASPB 2024 celebrating “The Plant Cell” The Plant Cell and “Plant Physiology” Plant Physiology!

Jordan, our recently graduated undergrad, presents her summer work at ASPB plant biology 2024!

Merchant lab had a great time at the 2024 GRC on Mitochondria & Chloroplasts in Spain! Gordon Research Conferences Everyone had great presentations and it was overall a successful meeting!

My first author preprint on polycistronic expression in green algae is here! Thanks so much to Sabeeha, Jeff, Rory and Sean for their guidance! Leaky ribosomal scanning enables tunable translation of bicistronic ORFs in green algae. biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

The Merchant has made some new findings on the mechanism of polycistronic expression in green algae, come read about it in our new preprint titled “Leaky ribosomal scanning enables tunable translation of bicistronic ORFs in green algae!” biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

My very first first-author research article is officially available The ISME Journal! See what it’s like for a bacterium to live off Chlamy’s photosynthesis under continuous &diurnal light. doi.org/10.1093/ismejo…

Congratulations to our first Cal PhD, Dr. Helen Liu! She gave an outstanding finishing talk on her work exploring iron nutrition in algae across the central dogma, from transcriptomics to structural biology. Helen W. Liu

Sabeeha’s 3rd phd student Hong Hua Li visited us in our laboratory today. Her work on plastocyanin has stood the test of time and she retired after a career in neurobiology. We love seeing our alumni!

Excellent plant scientists, colleagues and friends; stimulating & insightful scientific discussions; fun & exciting conversations; and fantastic cuisine at the restaurant called “Botanist”. What would you need more? Thanks Annual Reviews 🌹🌻🌱🌲🌾🍋🍅🌽🥰