Ellie Schwarz
University of Illinois
1400 IGB
1206 W Gregory Dr
Urbana, IL 61801 USA
I earned my undergraduate degrees in biochemistry and chemistry from Brandeis University. After graduating, I worked for a time as a research assistant at Princeton University investigating signal transduction pathways in human intraepithelial lymphocytes. After that, but before coming to the University of Illinois, I worked as a research biologist for the Food and Drug Association (FDA) in Bethesda, Maryland, also studying signaling in T-cells.
My current graduate work concerns chlorophyll turnover and trafficking in Arabidopsis. As a plant grows, becomes productive, and eventually declines it must be able to develop and modulate its photosynthetic apparatus in a fashion that carefully fulfills the need to conserve energy and nutrients while avoiding photodamage. A great deal is already known about the regulation of the proteins of which the photosynthetic apparatus is comprised. This is especially true of the light-harvesting antenna protein LHCII, whose abundance is dynamically dependent on light availability, and the photosynthetic core protein D1, which must continuously undergo degradation and repair in the face of photooxidative damage. Both of these proteins, among others, require chlorophyll as an integral prosthetic group. Their successful functioning is therefore ultimately controlled by chlorophyll availability. It is not currently known what becomes of protein-bound chlorophyll during antenna downsizing and D1 turnover, though it is generally acknowledged that the pool of available chlorophyll must be tightly restricted. In light of the fact that net degradation and de-novo synthesis of chlorophyll does not appear necessary during normal growth, I am investigating possible candidates for proteins involved in recycling of chlorophylls. These include the Early Light Inducible Proteins, Stress Enhanced Proteins, One Helix Protein, and Water-Soluble Chlorophyll Binding Protein. My research strategy involves cloning and in-vivo expression of epitope-tagged proteins, metabolic radiolabeling of chlorophyll, physiological and chlorophyll fluorescence studies.
