Alice Yen-Ping Ting is Taiwanese-born American chemist. She is a professor of Genetics, Biology, and Chemistry at Stanford University. She is also a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub investigator.
Ting joined the MIT Chemistry Department in 2002 where she was the Ellen Swallow Richards Professor until 2016. In 2016, she was recruited to Stanford University, Departments of Genetics, Biology, and Chemistry. Her research harnesses the power of directed evolution and synthetic organic chemistry to develop novel methods for studying the cell. She has received a number of awards, including a 2008 NIH Director's Pioneer Award, a 2010 Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award from the American Chemical Society, an NIH Transformative R01 Award, 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. 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 is a method for discovery of molecules that reside within a few nanometers 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 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 directed evolution: 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, split horseradish peroxidase for visualization of synapsesin vivo, FLARE for gaining genetic access to activated neural ensembles, SPARK for transcriptional readout of protein-protein interactions, and PRIME - 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 Green Fluorescent Protein.
