Laura Faye Landweber is an American

evolutionary biologist Evolutionary biology is the subfield of biology that studies the evolutionary processes (natural selection, common descent, speciation) that produced the diversity of life on Earth. It is also defined as the study of the history of life for ...

. , she is a professor of

biochemistry Biochemistry or biological chemistry is the study of chemical processes within and relating to living organisms. A sub-discipline of both chemistry and biology, biochemistry may be divided into three fields: structural biology, enzymology and ...

and

molecular biophysics Molecular biophysics is a rapidly evolving interdisciplinary area of research that combines concepts in physics, chemistry, engineering, mathematics and biology. It seeks to understand biomolecular systems and explain biological function in terms ...

and of

biological sciences Biology is the scientific study of life. It is a natural science with a broad scope but has several unifying themes that tie it together as a single, coherent field. For instance, all organisms are made up of cells that process hereditary ...

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

. Previously, she was a professor of

ecology Ecology () is the study of the relationships between living organisms, including humans, and their physical environment. Ecology considers organisms at the individual, population, community, ecosystem, and biosphere level. Ecology overlaps wi ...

and

evolutionary biology Evolutionary biology is the subfield of biology that studies the evolutionary processes (natural selection, common descent, speciation) that produced the diversity of life on Earth. It is also defined as the study of the history of life fo ...

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial Colleges, fourth-oldest ins ...

. She specializes in RNA-mediated

epigenetic In biology, epigenetics is the study of stable phenotypic changes (known as ''marks'') that do not involve alterations in the DNA sequence. The Greek prefix '' epi-'' ( "over, outside of, around") in ''epigenetics'' implies features that are "o ...

inheritance and

molecular evolution Molecular evolution is the process of change in the sequence composition of cellular molecules such as DNA, RNA, and proteins across generations. The field of molecular evolution uses principles of evolutionary biology and population genetics ...

Education

Landweber graduated summa cum laude with an A.B. in molecular biology from

in 1989 after completing a 50-page-long senior thesis titled "A Method for Evolutionary

Sequence Analysis In bioinformatics, sequence analysis is the process of subjecting a DNA, RNA or peptide sequence to any of a wide range of analytical methods to understand its features, function, structure, or evolution. Methodologies used include sequence alignm ...

Genes In biology, the word gene (from , ; "...Wilhelm Johannsen coined the word gene to describe the Mendelian units of heredity..." meaning ''generation'' or ''birth'' or ''gender'') can have several different meanings. The Mendelian gene is a ba ...

and

Pseudogenes Pseudogenes are nonfunctional segments of DNA that resemble functional genes. Most arise as superfluous copies of functional genes, either directly by DNA duplication or indirectly by reverse transcription of an mRNA transcript. Pseudogenes are ...

Using the

Polymerase Chain Reaction The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is a method widely used to rapidly make millions to billions of copies (complete or partial) of a specific DNA sample, allowing scientists to take a very small sample of DNA and amplify it (or a part of it) t ...

: Applications to the

Mouse A mouse ( : mice) is a small rodent. Characteristically, mice are known to have a pointed snout, small rounded ears, a body-length scaly tail, and a high breeding rate. The best known mouse species is the common house mouse (''Mus musculus' ...

Tcp-1 Gene." She received her M.A. and Ph.D. from

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

in 1991 and 1993, respectively. Her doctoral dissertation is titled "RNA editing and the evolution of mitochondrial DNA in kinetoplastid protozoa."

Research career

In 1994, Landweber became a faculty member of Princeton University at the age of 26. In a 2000 paper published in the ''

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America ''Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America'' (often abbreviated ''PNAS'' or ''PNAS USA'') is a peer-reviewed multidisciplinary scientific journal. It is the official journal of the National Academy of Scien ...

'' on biocomputers, Landweber solved chess's knights problem, where one determines how many non-attacking knights can be placed on a chessboard, using a test tube of RNA, a breakthrough in

DNA computing DNA computing is an emerging branch of unconventional computing which uses DNA, biochemistry, and molecular biology hardware, instead of the traditional electronic computing. Research and development in this area concerns theory, experiments, a ...

. Laura Landweber has also studied the evolution of the

genetic code The genetic code is the set of rules used by living cells to translate information encoded within genetic material ( DNA or RNA sequences of nucleotide triplets, or codons) into proteins. Translation is accomplished by the ribosome, which links ...

and the scrambled genomes of

ciliate The ciliates are a group of alveolates characterized by the presence of hair-like organelles called cilia, which are identical in structure to flagellum, eukaryotic flagella, but are in general shorter and present in much larger numbers, with a ...

s such as

Oxytricha ''Oxytricha'' is a genus of ciliates in the family Oxytrichidae. Genomics The draft macronuclear genome of ''Oxytricha trifallax'' was published in 2013. Species References

Spirotrichea Ciliate genera {{Ciliate-stub ...

. Her laboratory has supported the notion that the code was no accident but arose from affinities between the nucleic acid

codons The genetic code is the set of rules used by living cells to translate information encoded within genetic material ( DNA or RNA sequences of nucleotide triplets, or codons) into proteins. Translation is accomplished by the ribosome, which links ...

and their cognate

amino acid Amino acids are organic compounds that contain both amino and carboxylic acid functional groups. Although hundreds of amino acids exist in nature, by far the most important are the alpha-amino acids, which comprise proteins. Only 22 alpha am ...

s. Her studies of the massive rearrangements of the

genome In the fields of molecular biology and genetics, a genome is all the genetic information of an organism. It consists of nucleotide sequences of DNA (or RNA in RNA viruses). The nuclear genome includes protein-coding genes and non-coding ge ...

in the

micronucleus Micronucleus is the name given to the small nucleus that forms whenever a chromosome or a fragment of a chromosome is not incorporated into one of the daughter nuclei during cell division. It usually is a sign of genotoxic events and chromosomal i ...

of Oxytricha showed an unsuspected role for

non-coding RNA A non-coding RNA (ncRNA) is a functional RNA molecule that is not translated into a protein. The DNA sequence from which a functional non-coding RNA is transcribed is often called an RNA gene. Abundant and functionally important types of non-c ...

in directing the process epigenetically.

Publications

* DNA Based Computers II (1998), Landweber, L. and Baum, E., eds, American Mathematicsl Society * Genetics and the Extinction of Species: DNA and the Conservation of Biodiversity (1999), Landweber, L. F. and Dobson, A. P., eds, Princeton University Press * Evolution as Computation (2003), Landweber, L. F. and Winfree, E., eds, Springer Verlag

Awards and honors

*1999 –

Sigma Xi Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Honor Society () is a highly prestigious, non-profit honor society for scientists and engineers. Sigma Xi was founded at Cornell University by a junior faculty member and a small group of graduate students in 1886 ...

Young Investigator Award *2001 - Tulip Award for DNA Computing *2005 -

American Association for the Advancement of Science The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is an American international non-profit organization with the stated goals of promoting cooperation among scientists, defending scientific freedom, encouraging scientific respons ...

Fellow *2008 - Regional Award Winner,

Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists was established in 2007 through a partnership between the Blavatnik Family Foundation, headed by Leonard Blavatnik (Russian: Леонид Валентинович Блаватник), chairman of Access Indust ...

, The New York Academy of Sciences *2012 -

Guggenheim Fellow Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...

*2014 - Division R Lecturer, American Society for Microbiology

Personal life

Laura Landweber was married to physicist

Steven Gubser Steven Scott Gubser (May 4, 1972 – August 3, 2019) was a professor of physics at Princeton University. His research focused on theoretical particle physics, especially string theory, and the AdS/CFT correspondence. He was a widely cited scho ...

and has three daughters.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Landweber, Laura 1967 births DNA nanotechnology people Evolutionary biologists Harvard University alumni Living people Princeton University alumni Princeton University faculty Women evolutionary biologists