Bradley J. Merrill

The paper develops a synthetic biology system for preprogrammed, stepwise activation of endogenous genes in human stem cells.

The paper introduces a system for sequentially activating guide RNAs to control genetic manipulations in mammalian cells using Cas9, enabling preprogrammed cascades of gene editing events.

This paper shows that RNA polymerase can dislodge Cas9 from DNA breaks, improving genome editing and bacterial immunity by increasing mutagenesis and phage resistance.