Seth Shipman

Seth Shipman and his team develop innovative strategies to manipulate cells for discovery and therapeutic purposes. As a general principle, they build new technologies to intervene in human disease using molecular parts sourced from bacteria. For instance, Shipman’s team developed a way to record the order in which genes turn on in a living cell by co-opting two different bacterial immune systems, the retron system and the CRISPR system. His team plans to use that technology to understand how the order of gene expression during development drives the formation of different cells types and tissues. They are also working to improve the precision of genome editing technologies that will be used to correct disease-causing mutations, by using bacterial retroelements alongside CRISPR-Cas9.