James Alan Shapiro (born May 18, 1943) is an American biologist, an expert in bacterial genetics and a professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Chicago.
As an American Cancer Society fellow in Jon Beckwith’s laboratory at the Harvard Medical School 1968-70, he and his colleagues used in vivo genetic manipulations to clone and purify the lac operon of E. coli.
In 1975 Shapiro attended the ICN-UCLA Squaw Valley Symposium on Bacterial Plasmids, where his interest in DNA restructuring in bacteria was heightened by learning about the movements of antibiotic resistance transposons to new genomic locations.
This prompted him to organize, in collaboration with Sankar Adhya and the late Ahmed Bukhari, the first meeting on the topic of DNA insertion elements at Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory in 1976.
McClintock had first identified transposition (horizontal gene transfer) (movement to new genomic location) of DNA "controlling elements" in maize (sweetcorn) in 1948, for which discovery she was awarded a Nobel Prize 1983.
For instance, he analyzed how each strain of the sometimes pathogenic bacterium Proteus mirabilis forms its own pattern of complex terraced rings by periodic group “swarm" migration, an emergent property that can be explained by mathematical rules derived by a physicist collaborator, Sergei Esipov.
Shapiro related this to other complex multicellular behaviors, such as hunting, building protective structures, spreading spores, and individual bacteria sacrificing themselves for the benefit of the larger community.
[23] Shapiro maintains that many genome changes that occur naturally operate by similar molecular DNA rearrangements to those applied intentionally by scientists using genetic engineering techniques developed over the last few decades.