Alice Yen-Ping Ting is Taiwanese-born American chemist. She is a professor of Genetics, of Biology, and by courtesy, of Chemistry at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

. She is also a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub investigator.

Early life and education

Alice Ting was born in Taiwan and immigrated to the United States when she was three years old. She was raised in Texas and attended the

Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science The Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science (TAMS) is a two-year residential early entrance college program serving approximately 375 high school juniors and seniors at the University of North Texas. Students are admitted from every region of ...

(TAMS). She received her

B.S. A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Science was the University of ...

in Chemistry from

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

in 1996, working with Nobel laureate

E.J. Corey Elias James Corey (born July 12, 1928) is an American organic chemist. In 1990, he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his development of the theory and methodology of organic synthesis", specifically retrosynthetic analysis. Regarded by many ...

. She completed her Ph.D. with

Peter G. Schultz Peter G. Schultz (born June 23, 1956) is an American chemist. He is the CEO and Professor of Chemistry at The Scripps Research Institute, the founder and former director of GNF, and the founding director of the California Institute for Biomedi ...

at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

in 2000. Ting completed her postdoctoral fellowship with 2008 Nobel Laureate

Roger Y. Tsien Roger Yonchien Tsien (pronounced , "'' CHEN''"'';'' February 1, 1952 – August 24, 2016) was an American biochemist. He was a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of California, San Diego and was awarded the Nobel Prize in ...

Career

Ting joined the MIT Chemistry Department in 2002 where she was the Ellen Swallow Richards Professor until 2016. In 2016, she moved to Stanford University, Departments of Genetics, of Biology, and, by courtesy, of Chemistry. Her research harnesses the power of

directed evolution Directed evolution (DE) is a method used in protein engineering that mimics the process of natural selection to steer proteins or nucleic acids toward a user-defined goal. It consists of subjecting a gene to iterative rounds of mutagenesis (cre ...

and

synthetic organic chemistry Organic chemistry is a subdiscipline within chemistry involving the scientific study of the structure, properties, and reactions of organic compounds and organic materials, i.e., matter in its various forms that contain carbon atoms.Clayden, J.; ...

to develop novel methods for studying the cell. She has received a number of awards, including a 2008

NIH Director's Pioneer Award National Institutes of Health Director's Pioneer Award is a research initiative first announced in 2004 designed to support individual scientists' biomedical research. The focus is specifically on "pioneering" research that is highly innovative ...

, a 2010 Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award from the

American Chemical Society The American Chemical Society (ACS) is a scientific society based in the United States that supports scientific inquiry in the field of chemistry. Founded in 1876 at New York University, the ACS currently has more than 155,000 members at all d ...

, an NIH Transformative R01 Award (both 2013 and 2018), the McKnight Technological Innovations in Neuroscience Award, the Technology Review TR35 Award, the Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship, the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, the Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, and the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Biomedical Science in 2012. Ting has been an investigator of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub since 2017.

Research

Ting and her lab are credited with developing several influential techniques, some of which have been broadly adopted by academic and industrial researchers across the world.

Proximity labeling Enzyme-catalyzed proximity labeling (PL), also known as proximity-based labeling, is a laboratory technique that labels biomolecules, usually proteins or RNA, proximal to a protein of interest. By creating a gene fusion in a living cell between ...

(PL) is a method for discovery of molecules that reside within a few nanometers (1-5 nm) of a designated molecule of interest, within living cells or organisms. The technique involves fusing a promiscuous labeling enzyme to the molecule of interest and then adding a small-molecule substrate that enables the enzyme to covalently tag any (protein or RNA) molecule within its immediate vicinity. PL is a powerful method for elucidating signaling networks, dissecting molecular function, and potentially discovering novel disease genes. Ting's laboratory has developed three widely used enzymes for PL; all were engineered using

: the peroxidase APEX2, and the biotin ligases TurboID and miniTurbo. In addition, Ting and her lab developed monovalent streptavidin, site-specific biotinylation in mammalian cells, small monovalent quantum dots for single molecule imaging, APEX2 as a genetic tag for electron microscopy (analogous to

Green Fluorescent Protein The green fluorescent protein (GFP) is a protein that exhibits bright green fluorescence when exposed to light in the blue to ultraviolet range. The label ''GFP'' traditionally refers to the protein first isolated from the jellyfish ''Aequorea ...

but visible by electron microscopy), split

horseradish peroxidase The enzyme horseradish peroxidase (HRP), found in the roots of horseradish, is used extensively in biochemistry applications. It is a metalloenzyme with many isoforms, of which the most studied type is C. It catalyzes the oxidation of various or ...

for visualization of

synapses In the nervous system, a synapse is a structure that permits a neuron (or nerve cell) to pass an electrical or chemical signal to another neuron or to the target effector cell. Synapses are essential to the transmission of nervous impulses from ...

in vivo, FLARE for gaining genetic access to activated neural ensembles, SPARK for transcriptional readout of protein-protein interactions, and PRIME (PRobe Incorporation Mediated by Enzymes) - a protein labeling technique that enables scientists to capitalize on the brightness, photostability, small size, and chemical diversity of small-molecule probes as an alternative to

References

External links

TR35

Ting Laboratory website at Stanford
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Ting, Alice American women chemists Harvard College alumni Living people Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Science faculty Organic chemists Taiwanese emigrants to the United States University of California, Berkeley alumni Taiwanese chemists Stanford University Department of Chemistry faculty Year of birth missing (living people) 21st-century American women