In-Hyun Park, Ph.D.
Cell and Structural Biology
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Illinois - 2005

Post-Doctoral Fellow

Research Interests:

Understanding how different cells obtain their identities, interact with each other and function coordinately in an organism is not only biologically interesting, but critical for sucessful biolmedical research and the development of improved therapeutics. I studied the nutrient/mTOR cellular growth signaling pathway during my Ph.D. training, where an interest in cell fate specification led me to study myogenic pathways using the C2C12 murine myoblast model.

Pluripotency, a unique property of certain cells including embryonic stem (ES) cells, intrigued me to further explore cell fate determination in ES cells in Dr. Daley's lab as a post-doctoral trainee. Recently, I demonstrated that four genes important for ES cell pluripotency and self-renewal (Oct4, Sox2, Klf4, and cMyc) were capable of inducing pluripotency in human somatic cell lines. I have used this technique to also derive patient-specific induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. It is my aim to continue studying more efficient ways of obtaining iPS cells from human somatic cells, while exploring the biology of cell fate determination.
  
Articles in PubMed
 
PUBLICATIONS:

In-Hyun Park, Rebecca Bachmann, Haider Shirazi, and Jie Chen (2002) Regulation of ribosomal S6 Kinase 2 by mammalian target of rapamycin, J. Biol. Chem. 277: 31423-31429.

Erbu Erbay, In-Hyun Park, Paul Nuzzi, and Jie Chen (2003) IGF-II Transcription in Skeletal Muscle Myogenesis is Controlled by mTOR and Nutrients, J. Cell Biol. 163: 931-936.

Yimin Fang, In-Hyun Park, Ai-Luen Wu, Guangwei Du, Ping Huang, Michael A. Frohman, Stephanei J. Walker, Alex Brown, and Jie Chen (2003) PLD1 regulates mTOR signaling and mediates Cdc42, Curr. Biol. 13: 2037-2044.

In-Hyun Park and Jong-Ok Ka (2003) Isolation and characterization of 4-(2,4- dichlorophenoxy) butyric acid (2,4-DB)-degrading bacteria from agricultural soils. J. Microbiol. Biotechnol. 13:243-250.

In-Hyun Park, Jie Chen (2005) Mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) signaling is required for a late-stage fusion process during skeletal myotube maturation. J. Biol. Chem. 280:32009-320017.

In-Hyun Park, Erbu Erbay and Jie Chen (2005) Skeletal myocyte hypertrophy requires mTOR kinase activity and S6K1. Exp. Cell Res. 309:211-219.

Rebecca Bachmann, Jeong-Ho Kim, Ai-Luen Wu, In-Hyun Park and Jie Chen (2006) A nuclear transport signal in mammalian target of rapamycin is critical for its cytoplasmic signaling to S6 kinase 1. J. Biol. Chem. 281:7357-7363.

Jason A West, In-Hyun Park, George Q Daley and Niels Geijsen (2006) In vitro generation of germ cells from murine embryonic stem cells. Nature Protocols. 1:2026-2036.

In-Hyun Park, George Q Daley (2007) Debugging cellular reprogramming. Nature Cell. Biol. 9:871-873.

In-Hyun Park, Rui Zhao, Jason A. West, Akiko Yabuuchi, Hongguang Huo, Tan A. Ince, Paul H. Lerou, M. William Lensch and George Q Daley (2008) Reprogramming of human somatic cells to pluripotency with defined factors. Nature 451:141-146.

In-Hyun Park*, Paul H. Lerou*, Rui Zhao, Hongguang Huo, and George Q Daley (2008) Generation of human induced pluripotent stem cells. Nature Protocols 3:1180-1186. (* contributed equally)

In-Hyun Park, Natasha Arora , Hongguang Huo, Nimet Maherali, Tim Ahfeldt, Akiko Shimamura, M. William Lensch, Chad Cowan, Konrad Hochedlinger and George Q Daley (2008) Disease-specific induced pluripotent stem cells. Cell, 134:877-886.

Franz-Josef Müller, Louise C. Laurent, Dennis Kostka, Igor Ulitsky, Roy Williams, Christina Lu, In-Hyun Park, Mahendra S. Rao, Ron Shamir, Philip H. Schwartz, Nils O. Schmidt & Jeanne F. Loring (2008) Regulatory networks define phenotypic classes of human stem cell lines. Nature, 455:401-406.

In-Hyun Park, and George Q Daley (2008) human iPS cell derivation/reprogramming. Curr. Protoc. Stem Cell Biol. (in press).