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Professor Seyun Kim Identifies a Neuron Signal Controlling Molecule
A research team led by Professor Seyun Kim of the Department of Biological Sciences at KAIST has identified inositol pyrophosphates as the molecule that strongly controls neuron signaling via synaptotagmin.
Professors Tae-Young Yoon of Yonsei University’s Y-IBS and Sung-Hyun Kim of Kyung Hee University’s Department of Biomedical Science also joined the team.
The results were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) on June 30, 2016.
This interdisciplinary research project was conducted by six research teams from four different countries and covered a wide scope of academic fields, from neurobiology to super resolution optic imaging.
Inositol pyrophosphates such as 5-diphosphoinositol pentakisphos-phate (5-IP7), which naturally occur in corns and beans, are essential metabolites in the body. In particular, inositol hexakisphosphate (IP6) has anti-cancer properties and is thought to have an important role in cell signaling.
Inositol pentakisphosphate (IP7) differs from IP6 by having an additional phosphate group, which was first discovered 20 years ago. IP7 has recently been identified as playing a key role in diabetes and obesity.
Psychopathy and neurodegenerative diseases are known to result from the disrupted balance of inositol pyrophosphates. However, the role and the mechanism of action of IP7 in brain neurons and nerve transmission remained unknown.
Professor Kim’s team has worked on inositol pyrophosphates for several years and discovered that very small quantities of IP7 control cell-signaling transduction. Professor Yoon of Yonsei University identified IP7 as a much stronger inhibitor of neuron signaling compared to IP6. In particular, IP7 directly suppresses synaptotagmin, one of the key proteins in neuron signaling. Moreover, Professor Kim of Kyung Hee University observed IP7 inhibition in sea horse neurons.
Together, the joint research team identified inositol pyrophosphates as the key switch metabolite of brain-signaling transduction.
The researchers hope that future research on synaptotagmin and IP7 will reveal the mechanism of neuron-signal transduction and thus enable the treatment of neurological disorders.
These research findings were the result of cooperation of various science and technology institutes: KAIST, Yonsei-IBS (Institute for Basic Science), Kyung Hee University, Sungkyunkwan University, KIST, University of Zurich in Switzerland, and Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg in Germany.
Schematic Image of Controlling the Synaptic Exocytotic Pathway by 5-IP7 , Helping the Understanding of the Signaling Mechanisms of Inositol Pyrophosphates
2016.07.21 View 10489 -
Public Lectures on the Korean Language and Alphabet
The School of Humanities and Social Sciences at KAIST will offer public lectures on the Korean language and alphabet, Hangul, from March 22, 2016 to April 26, 2016.
The lectures, which are entitled “The Riddle of Hangul,” will take place on campus in Daejeon.
A total of six lectures will be held on such topics as the origin of Korean, the grammar of ancient Korean in the Chosun Dynasty (1392-1897), and subsequent developments in contemporary Korean.
Professor Jung-Hoon Kim, who is responsible for organizing the public lecture program, said, “The audience will have an interesting opportunity to understand the history of Korean and its mechanism, while reviewing the unique spelling system of Hangul. I hope many people will show up for these wonderful classes.”
For further information and registration, please visit: http://hss.kaist.ac.kr. All lectures, available only in Korean, are free and open to the public.
2016.03.15 View 7406 -
Dr. Ryu of KAIST Receives the S-Oil Outstanding Paper Award
Dr. Je-Kyung Ryu of KAIST’s Department of Physics has been awarded the S-Oil Outstanding Paper Award for his doctoral dissertation’s originality and applicability.
Professor Tae-Young Yoon of Physics is his doctoral advisor.
The award ceremony took place on November 25, 2015 at the Press Center in Seoul.
This S-Oil Outstanding Paper Award, jointly sponsored by the Korean Academy of Science and Technology (KAST) and the Scholastic University Presidential Association, was established to foster young talented scientists in basic science and to advance the field.
The award is given every other year for each of the fields of physics, chemistry, mathematics, biology, and earth sciences.
With the award, Dr. Ryu received a research grant of USD 8,600.
He discovered, for the first time in the world, how NSF (N-ethylmaleimide-sensitive factor), a protein involved in a vesicular transport in cellular activities, disassembles a SNARE (soluble NSF attachment protein receptor) complex, using a unimolecular biophysics method.
Unlike the existing studies, he proposed a model in which NSF disassembles SNARE complexes at one step, and as a result, provided evidence of how the SNARE complex influenced the fusion of biological membranes.
His research was published in the scientific journal Science issued on March 27, 2015. The title of the paper is “Spring-loaded Unraveling of a Single SNARE Complex by NSF in One Round of ATP Turnover.”
2015.11.27 View 7703 -
Public Lectures by KAIST's Humanities and Social Sciences Research Center
The Humanities and Social Sciences Research Center at KAIST offers public lectures at the International Seminar Hall of the Humanities and Social Sciences building on campus from November 12, 2015 to December 10, 2015. There will be four lectures, all of which will be available in Korean only.
The theme of the lectures is “social issues and strategic solutions.” Experts in various fields including women’s studies, criminal psychology, Go (a Chinese board game) and its philosophy, and Korean studies will participate, offering multifaceted analysis and solutions for social issues in Korea.
Joo-Hee Kim, a researcher at the Korean Women’s Institute of Ewha Women’s University, will lecture on “Problems of Loan Products Exclusively for Women” and discuss the background of "micro-loans" which are often targeted at women, while evaluating the logic of financial corporations behind marketing such products.
Lectures by Professor Ji-Sun Park from the Department of Social Psychology at Ewha Women’s University on “Understanding of Criminal Psychology from Letters,” Professor Soo-Hyun Jeong from the Department of Go at Myeongji University on “Life Lessons and Strategies from Playing Go,” and Professor Seung-Taek Ahn from Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies of Seoul National University on “Community Problems in Folk Culture” will follow.
The organizer of the lectures, Professor Jung-Hoon Kim of the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at KAIST said,
“These lectures will provide local citizens and the KAIST family a wonderful opportunity to understand important social issues from the perspective of social science. It will also serve as a valuable time to think about how our social conflicts could differ from those of other countries, helping us to find solutions.”
To register for these free lectures, go to http://hss.kaist.ac.kr by November 9, 2015.
2015.11.06 View 6195 -
Professors Sukbok Chang and Jang-Wook Choi Receive the 2015 Knowledge Award from the Korean Government
The Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning (MISP) of the Republic of Korea announced the 2015 Knowledge Awards on October 20, 2015. Two KAIST professors received the award.
Established in 2009, the awards are presented to Korean scientists whose publications have contributed to the international science community. Specifically, the MISP used the two biggest science databases, Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) and Scopus, to identify ten highly cited papers ranked in the top 1% by total citations in the past ten years.
Professor Sukbok Chang of Chemistry (left in the picture below) is a global authority in the field of catalytic hydrocarbon functionalization. His paper entitled “Palladium-catalyzed C-H Functionalization of Pyridine N-Oxides: Highly Selective Alkenylation and Direct Arylation with Unactivated Arenes,” which was published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society in 2008, was once selected by Thomson Reuters as one of the “Most Influential Research Papers of the Month.” In 2011, the American Chemical Society included his paper in the list of the top 20 research papers that were most frequently cited in the last three years.
Professor Jang-Wook Choi of the Graduate School of EEWS (Energy, Environment, Water, and Sustainability) has been known for his leading research in rechargeable battery, supercapacitor, and materials chemistry. In particular, his work on secondary fuel cells attracted significant attention from academia and industry in Korea. Professor Choi developed a super-thin flexible lithium-ion battery this year, thinner than a credit card, which lasts longer than the existing batteries and with greater performance. He also developed new electrode materials for next-generation sodium-ion and magnesium secondary fuel cells.
Professor Sukbok Chang (left) and Professor Jang-Wook Choi (right)
2015.10.23 View 9882 -
Nikon Instruments Korea Donates a Fund to KAIST's Department of Biological Sciences
Representatives from Nikon Instruments Korea Co., Ltd., a producer of microscopes and measuring instruments, visited the KAIST campus on September 25, 2015, and donated USD 9,000 to the Department of Biological Sciences at KAIST.
A small ceremony to mark the donation took place at the department’s conference room.
In the picture from left to right were Professor Won-Do Heo, Department Head Byung-Ha Oh, Professor Sangyong Jon, President Sam-Sup Jang of Korea Instech, and Director Ik-Soo Yoo of Nikon Instruments Korea.
The department announced that the fund would be used to build its new research center to house the state-of-the-art research equipment and tools for the development of new medicine.
2015.10.03 View 4707 -
KAIST's Mathematician Reveals the Mechanism for Sustaining Biological Rhythms
Our bodies have a variety of biological clocks that follow rhythms or oscillations with periods ranging from seconds to days. For example, our hearts beat every second, and cells divide periodically. The circadian clock located in the hypothalamus generates twenty-four hour rhythms, timing our sleep and hormone release. How do these biological clocks or circuits generate and sustain the stable rhythms that are essential to life?
Jae Kyoung Kim, who is an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at KAIST, has predicted how these biological circuits generate rhythms and control their robustness, utilizing mathematical modeling based on differential equations and stochastic parameter sampling. Based on his prediction, using synthetic biology, a research team headed by Matthew Bennett of Rice University constructed a novel biological circuit that spans two genetically engineered strains of bacteria, one serves as an activator and the other as a repressor to regulate gene expression across multiple cell types, and found that the circuit generates surprisingly robust rhythms under various conditions.
The results of the research conducted in collaboration with KAIST (Korea Institute of Science and Technology), Rice University, and the University of Houston were published in Science (August 28, 2015 issue). The title of the paper is "Emergent Genetic Oscillations in a Synthetic Microbial Consortium" .
The top-down research approach, which focuses on identifying the components of biological circuits, limits our understanding of the mechanisms in which the circuits generate rhythms. Synthetic biology, a rapidly growing field at the interface of biosciences and engineering, however, uses a bottom-up approach.
Synthetic biologists can create complex circuits out of simpler components, and some of these new genetic circuits are capable of fluctuation to regulate gene production. In the same way that electrical engineers understand how an electrical circuit works as they construct batteries, resistors, and wires, synthetic biologists can understand better about biological circuits if they put them together using genes and proteins. However, due to the complexity of biological systems, both experiments and mathematical modeling need to be applied hand in hand to design these biological circuits and understand their function.
In this research, an interdisciplinary approach proved that a synthetic intercellular singling circuit generates robust rhythms to create a cooperative microbial system. Specifically, Kim's mathematical analysis suggested, and experiments confirmed, that the presence of negative feedback loops in addition to a core transcriptional negative feedback loop can explain the robustness of rhythms in this system. This result provides important clues about the fundamental mechanism of robust rhythm generation in biological systems.
Furthermore, rather than constructing the entire circuit inside a single bacterial strain, the circuit was split among two strains of Escherichia coli bacterium. When the strains were grown together, the bacteria exchanged information, completing the circuit. Thus, this research also shows how, by regulating individual cells within the system, complex biological systems can be controlled, which in turn influences each other (e.g., the gut microbiome in humans).
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Ye Chen, a graduate student in Bennett's laboratory at Rice University, and Jae Kyoung Kim, an assistant professor at KAIST and a former postdoctoral fellow at Ohio State University, are the lead authors of the paper. The co-authors are Rice graduate student Andrew Hirning and Krešimir Josic?, a professor of mathematics at the University of Houston. Bennett is the Assistant Professor of the Biochemistry and Cell Biology Department at Rice University.
About the researcher: While Jae Kyoung Kim is a mathematician, he has also solved various biological puzzles in collaboration with various experimental laboratories of Matthew Bennett at Rice University, David Virshup at Duke and the National University of Singapore, Carla Finkielstein at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Choo-Gon Lee at the Florida State University, Seung-Hee Yoo at the Medical School of the University of Texas, Toru Takumi at RIKEN Brain Science Institute, and Travis Wager at Pfizer Inc. He has used non-linear dynamics and stochastic analysis to understand the function of biochemical networks in biological systems. In particular, he is interested in mechanisms generating and regulating biological rhythms.
Picture 1: This schematic image is the design of a biological circuit between two strains of bacteria and the part of differential equations used to understand the function of the biological circuit.
Picture 2: The core transcriptional negative feedback loop and additional negative feedback loop in the biological circuit (picture 1) generate robust rhythms. The snapshots correspond the red dots in the time series graph.
2015.08.31 View 8194 -
Dr. Se-Jung Kim Receives the Grand Prize at the International Photo and Image Contest on Light
Dr. Se-Jung Kim of the Physics Department at KAIST received the Grand Prize at the 2015 Photo and Image Contest of the International Year of Light and Light-based Technologies.
The United Nations has designated the year 2015 as the International Year of Light and Light-based Technologies.
The Optical Society of Korea celebrated the UN’s designation by hosting an international photo and image contest on the theme of light and optics related technology.
Dr. Kim presented a photo of images taken from a liquid crystal, which was entitled “A Micro Pinwheel.” She took pictures of liquid crystal images with a polarizing microscope and then colored the pictures. The liquid crystal has self-assembled circle domain structures, and each domain can form vortex optics. Her adviser for the project is Professor Yong-Hoon Cho of the Physics Department.
Her work was exhibited during the annual conference of the Optical Society of Korea, which was held on July 13-15, 2015 at Gyeong-Ju Hwabaek International Convention Center. It will also be exhibited at the National Science Museum in Gwacheon and the Kim Dae-Jung Convention Center in Gwangju.
Picture: A Micro Pinwheel
2015.07.31 View 8530 -
Professor Sangyong Jon Appointed Fellow of AIMBE
Professor Sangyong Jon of the Department of Biological Sciences at KAIST has been appointed a member of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) fellowship.
Established in 1991, AIMBE is a non-profit organization based in Washington, D.C., representing 50,000 individuals and the top 2% of medical and biological engineers. AIMBE provides policy advice and advocacy for medical and biological engineering for the benefit of humanity. It has had about 1,500 fellows over the past 25 years. Among the members, only 110 are non-American nationalities.
Following the appointment of Dr. Hae-Bang Lee, the former senior researcher at the Korean Research Institute of Chemical Technology, and Distinguished Professor Sang Yup Lee of the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at KAIST, Professor Jon is the third Korean to become an AIMBE fellow. He had an induction ceremony for the appointment of his fellowship at the AIMBE’s Annual Event held on March 15-17, 2015 in Washington, D.C.
An authority on nanomedicine, Professor Jon has developed many original technologies including multi-functional Theranostics nano particles for the diagnosis and treatment of diseases. He received the Most Cited Paper Award from Theranostics, an academic journal specialized in nanomedicine, last February.
Additionally, Professor Jon is a leading researcher in the field of translational medicine, using a multi-disciplinary, highly collaborative, “Bench to Bedside” approach for disease treatment and prevention. He created a biotechnology venture company and transferred research developments to the industry in Korea.
2015.03.12 View 11396 -
The Number of KAIST Doctoral Graduates to Reach Over Ten Thousands
The ten-thousandth doctoral graduate received her degree in the commencement ceremony on February 13, 2015.
KAIST has contributed to the development of science, technology, and industry in Korea by fostering talents in advanced science and engineering.
Since its establishment forty-four years ago, more than ten-thousand KAIST alumni have received their doctorates. This year’s graduation ceremony took place on February 13, 2015, at the Sports Complex on campus, awarding the ten-thousandth doctoral degree.
Dr. Sun-Mi Cho of the Department of Biological Sciences received the ten-thousandth doctoral degree. A graduate of Jeon-Nam Science High School, Dr. Cho also received her Bachelor of Science degree from KAIST.
Dr. Cho wrote a dissertation entitled “GABA from reactive astrocytes impairs learning and memory in Alzheimer disease.” Her dissertation adviser was Professor Daesoo Kim of the Department of Biological Sciences.
Dr. Cho, who will be a post-doctorate researcher at the Biological Sciences Department, said, “It was my childhood dream to receive a doctorate from KAIST. I cannot believe that I’m the ten-thousandth doctoral graduate, for which I’m very grateful.” She continued, “I hope to become a neuroscientist where I can be of help to the sick.”
In 1978, KAIST only had two doctoral graduates, but since 1987 there have been more than one hundred graduates each year, two hundred since 1994, and four hundred since 2000. In 2015, 522 doctoral students graduated.
One of the first doctoral graduates, Dong-Yol Yang (class of 1978 in the Mechanical Engineering Department), became a professor at the same department of KAIST. Professor Yang expressed his thoughts on the news, “There was a trend in Korea to go overseas for Ph.D. degrees in the early 1970s, but it changed when KAIST began to select candidates for Master’s degrees in 1973 and Doctoral degrees in 1975. Talented Korean students came to KAIST laboratories, and its graduates were known for their knowledge and skills. Now, we see that the talent is coming from overseas.”
At the 2015 Commencement, KAIST conferred 522 Doctoral, 1,241 Master’s, and 915 Bachelor of Science (B.S.) degrees.
Since its inception in 1971, KAIST has granted 10,403 doctor's, 26,402 master's, and 51,412 bachelor's degrees.
In the picture below, Professor Dong-Yol Yang (left) seats next to Dr. Sun-Mi Cho (right), the recipient of 10,000th doctoral degree.
2015.02.16 View 9768 -
Professor Eunjoon Kim Is KAIST's Person of the Year 2014
KAIST announced that it has named Chair Professor Eunjoon Kim of the Department of Biological Sciences as its “Person of the Year 2014.” The award ceremony took place at the auditorium on campus on January 5, 2014.
Established in 2001, the award has been presented to a KAIST faculty member who has made great achievements in research and education, thereby contributing to the advancement of KAIST.
Professor Kim was the first to identify the mechanism of synapse formation between neurons during his post-doctoral program at Harvard Medical School in 1995. The research was published in Nature.
In 2011, Professor Kim discovered that the lack of protein GIT1, a neuronal synapse in the brain, caused ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). He is widely recognized for his work concerning synapse proteins and brain disease related research that set the foundation for future medical developments.
In his award speech, Professor Kim said, “Whenever a research finding concerning a new drug therapy or research is published, I receive many inquiries from the parents of children with ADHD or autism. As a scientist, I would like to focus my research ultimately to help those in pain, rather than just pursuing research excellence or reputation.”
2015.01.06 View 9732 -
Professor Mikyoung Lim Receives the MediaV Young Researcher Award
Professor Mikyoung Lim of the Department of Mathematical Sciences at KAIST received the MediaV Young Researchers Award at the International Conference on Inverse Problems and Related Topics that took place at the National Taiwan University, Taiwan, on December 15-19, 2014.
The Conference established the MediaV Young Researcher Award in 2010 to recognize distinguished scholars who are age 40 or younger and have made important contributions to the field of inverse problems. This year, two recipients were chosen for the award.
Professor Lim has focused her research on the incremental reading of incomprehensible materials’ imaging and the effect of invisibility cloaking.
The other awardee was Kui Ren, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
2014.12.27 View 9790