Laura Landweber
American evolutionary biologist
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Education
Landweber graduated summa cum laude with an A.B. in molecular biology from Princeton University in 1989 after completing a 50-page-long senior thesis titled "A Method for Evolutionary Sequence Analysis of Genes and Pseudogenes Using the Polymerase Chain Reaction: Applications to the Mouse Tcp-1 Gene" in which she described linear PCR.
She received her M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1991 and 1993, respectively. Her doctoral dissertation is titled "RNA editing and the evolution of mitochondrial DNA in kinetoplastid protozoa."
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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 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.
Laura Landweber has also studied the evolution of the genetic code and the scrambled genomes of ciliates such as Oxytricha. Her laboratory has supported the notion that the code was no accident but arose from affinities between the nucleic acid codons and their cognate amino acids. Her studies of the massive rearrangements of the genome in the micronucleus of Oxytricha showed an unsuspected role for non-coding RNA in directing the process epigenetically.
Publications (books)
- 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
Personal life
Laura Landweber was married to physicist Steven Gubser and has three daughters.