Elaine Munsey Tobin (born December 23, 1944, Louisville, Kentucky)[3] is a professor of molecular, cell, and developmental biology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
While in high school, she also participated in civil rights marches and heard Martin Luther King Jr. speak in Louisville.
[3] After graduation, she spent a summer as an Appalachian Volunteer, working as a community organizer in Wolfe County, Kentucky, as part of Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty.
They spent a year at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, where Elaine Tobin worked with plant geneticist Ezra Galun.
[13] Tobin was able to isolate poly(A) RNA from duckweed, expose slab gels to x-ray film, and show that while some mRNAs decreased in light, others increased.
Light-harvesting chlorophyll a/b-binding (LHCB) protein sequences from Lemna gibba were low in darkness but could be rapidly and reversibly restored by light exposure.
[13][14][15] By growing duckweed heterotrophically in the dark, and exposing it briefly to red and far-red light, Tobin demonstrated the effects of phytochromes on plant growth and transcription in rcbs genes.
Using a DNA fragment, they screened the Arabidopsis expression library, and cloned a protein with relevant binding activity, which they named CCA1.