Sarah Elgin

Sarah C.R. Elgin is an American biologist noted for her work in epigenetics, gene regulation, and heterochromatin and her contributions to science education.

Contents

• S Elgin Repetitious elements drive silencing in Drosophila via heterochromatin formation
• Memberships
• References

In high school, Elgin studied fallout levels in Oregon rainwater after nuclear weapons tests in the Soviet Union. She received her B.A. in chemistry from Pomona College. While at Pomona, she participated in a summer research program at the University of Leeds characterizing the egg stalk of the green lacewing fly Chrysopa vittata. Elgin did her graduate work in the lab of James Bonner at the California Institute of Technology, isolating and characterizing nonhistone chromosomal proteins from rat livers. She received her Ph.D. in biochemistry in 1972. Elgin stayed at Caltech for her postdoctoral research, working in the lab of Leroy Hood. She continued to isolate and characterize nonhistone chromosomal proteins but started studying Drosophila.

After her postdoc, Elgin joined the faculty at Harvard University, where her lab pioneered immunostaining of polytene chromosomes from Drosophila larval salivary glands and nuclease digestion assays.

In 1981, Elgin joined the faculty in the Department of Biology at Washington University in St. Louis. Her lab isolated and characterized Heterochromatin Protein 1 in Drosophila (now known as Su(var)205 or HP1a). To probe chromatin environments, her lab developed a P element construct with a copy of the white gene driven by the hsp70 promoter. When this reporter gene is inserted into heterochromatic environments, the fly eyes display a vareigating phenotype, whereas when the P element is inserted into euchromatin the fly eyes show a red phenotype; this phenomenon is known as Position-effect variegation. Nuclease digestion assays have confirmed that the eye phenotypes are indicative of the chromatin environment surrounding the P element insertion site. In 2006, Elgin was named as the inaugural Viktor Hamburger Distinguished Professor in Arts and Sciences [2].

At Washington University and in the St. Louis area, Elgin has been active in science education. She founded the Washington University Science Outreach program in 1989 [3] and has been active in science education in the University City school district.

In 2002 Elgin became an HHMI Professor [4][5] with the goal to develop core curriculum to integrate primary research in genomics with a college course called Phage Bioinformatics. This project has been expanded and disseminated as the Genomics Education Partnership [6], a consortium of 66 member colleges and universities [7] who participate in sequence improvement and annotation projects with the goal of publishing the results in primary research journals.