Elçin Ünal and Gloria Brar adopted this team approach when they started their lab together (the Br-Ün lab) at University of California at Berkeley in 2014. And, in the spring of 2019, Omar Abudayyeh, PhD, and Jonathan Gootenberg, PhD, followed suit, setting up their joint lab at the McGovern Institute at MIT. They decided on this path—and passed on doing a traditional post-doc—in large part so that they could keep working together. Why? “We work well as a team,” says Abudayyeh.

In just two years, their partnership has paid off. In their latest paper, the lab describes Cas7-11, a single protein that consolidates the domains of more complex CRISPR systems. The new system is akin to a type III CRISPR system, which have many subunits and form large complexes, making them difficult to use as tools. The Cas7-11 system, however, has elegantly condensed all the domains into a single protein that cuts RNA.

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