Dr. Steven Schwartzbach

Professor

Phone
901.678.4470
Fax
901.678.4457
Office
UofM Central Campus, Life Sciences 423
Office Hours
By appointment
 
Dr. Steven Schwartzbach

About Dr. Schwartzbach

Dr. Schwartzbach came to the Department in 2001 from the University of Nebraska. He teaches Biology 3130 Cell Biology. He began his research career characterizing the coding capacity of the chloroplast genome and established his laboratory in Nebraska focusing on the photoregulation of chloroplast development in the protist Euglena. In the course of these studies he found that some Euglena proteins were synthesized as polyprotein precursors, that Euglena mRNAs contained a common trans-spliced 5' end and that Euglena transcripts did not contain the canonical intron exon junctions characteristic of most eukaryotic messages. His current research focuses on the unique ER to Golgi to chloroplast transport pathway for cytoplasmically synthesized chloroplast proteins and the process of secondary endosymbiosis responsible for the evolution of complex plastids; plastids surrounded by three or four membranes rather than the two membranes of higher plants and most algae.

Education

B.S. Biology, State University of New York at Buffalo; Ph.D. Biology, Brandeis University; American Cancer Society Post-Doctoral Fellow, Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Research Interests

  • Biochemistry of protein targeting and import into secondary plastids
  • Molecular mechanism of chloroplast genome reduction and loss
  • Chloroplast evolution