Assistant Professor Patrick Shih was recently selected as a 2019 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in Computational and Evolutionary Molecular Biology. The fellowship will help fund his research to reconstruct the evolution of photosynthesis.

How did plants develop photosynthesis? The story is really nothing more than a tale of biological thievery. Publishing in The Plant Cell, Lagarias and his colleagues found that a pigment called biliverdin is essential to light-induced chlorophyll production in the alga. This discovery is helping scientists understand why diverse algae retain these pigments, although many lack phytochromes.