Pardis Sabeti Saturday, June 20, 2009

Pardis Sabeti during the World Economic Forum 2008

Pardis C. Sabeti (born December 25, 1975) is an Iranian American evolutionary geneticist, who developed a statistical method which identifies sections of the genome that have been subject to natural selection.^[1][2][3] Sabeti is an Assistant Professor in the Center for Systems Biology and Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. ^[4] She is rated 49th in Telegraph's World's Top 100 living geniuses.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Research 3 References 4 External links

Biography

Sabeti completed her undergraduate degree at MIT and continued her education at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, before returning to earn her medical degree from Harvard Medical School where she was only the third woman ever to graduate summa cum laude^{[citation needed]}. She is also the lead singer and bass player of the Rock band Thousand Days.^[5] She has also received a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award in the Biomedical Sciences.^[5]

Research

Sabeti addressed the problem of telling whether a mutation is due to natural selection or just random. When humans are exposed to diseases, like malaria and Lassa fever, they evolve traits that resist those diseases, such as sickle cell trait. Biologists can tell from comparing DNA sequences in populations whether mutations were due to natural selection, but those methods wouldn't work for evolutionary changes during the last 10,000 years, when diseases like malaria arose.

Sabeti took advantage of the fact that genes on the same place in the chromosome are inherited together. If a particular variation is subject to natural selection, its frequency will increase, along with the frequency of genes that have hitchhiked along with it. She developed a test that would use this principle to tell whether recent changes were due to natural selection or just chance. She applied this test to malaria variants, and saw a "whopping signal" of positive selection. This research was published in Nature. She later identified 2 genes, LARGE and DMD, that protect against Lassa fever, and show strong signals of natural selection in West Africans.^[6]