Dr Jun Sung Park
Jun Sung obtained his BSc in Biological Sciences at KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology) and continued his PhD study under supervision of Professor Jeong Ho Lee.
While trained as a hybrid experimental-computational biologist, he detected and functionally validated sub-clonal (somatic) mutations in brain tissues underlying idiopathic brain diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease, glioblastoma and intractable epilepsy. He gradually anticipated that, however, it is not only the mutation carrying cells, but understanding spatial information and related cell-to-cell interaction that are crucial to unravel profound pathophysiology of diseases.
Recent technological advances in spatially resolved RNA-sequencing and high-multiplexed RNA imaging (STx) have pioneered the spatial transcriptomic analysis of tissues. As an ESPOD Fellow (shared with EMBL-EBI and the Wellcome Sanger Institute), Jun Sung will combine STx data with multi-omics to answer unresolved questions in large-scale spatial genomic cancer studies. His particular research interest involves understanding the tumour micro-environment and subsequent metastatic event in uveal melanoma, the role of myeloid-derived suppressor cells in lung carcinoma, and clonal evolution in breast invasive ductal carcinoma.
Select publications
- Lee, J.H., Lee, J.E., Kahng, J.Y. et al. Human glioblastoma arises from subventricular zone cells with low-level driver mutations. Nature 560, 243–247 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-018-0389-3
- Park, J.S., Lee, J., Jung, E.S. et al. Brain somatic mutations observed in Alzheimer’s disease associated with aging and dysregulation of tau phosphorylation. Nat Commun 10, 3090 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-11000-7
- Park, S.A., Jung, J.M., Park, J.S. et al. SWATH-MS analysis of cerebrospinal fluid to generate a robust battery of biomarkers for Alzheimer’s disease. Sci Rep 10, 7423 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-64461-y
- Ju, Y., Park, J., Kim, D. et al. SHP2 mutations induce precocious gliogenesis of Noonan syndrome-derived iPSCs during neural development in vitro. Stem Cell Res Ther 11, 209 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13287-020-01709-4
- Young, A.M.H., Kumasaka, N., Calvert, F. et al. A map of transcriptional heterogeneity and regulatory variation in human microglia. Nat Genet 53, 861–868 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41588-021-00875-2
- Kleshchevnikov, V., Shmatko, A., Dann, E. et al. Cell2location maps fine-grained cell types in spatial transcriptomics. Nat Biotechnol 40, 661–671 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-021-01139-4
- Lomakin, A., J. Svedlund, C. Strell, M. Gataric, et al. 2021. “Spatial Genomics Maps the Structure, Character and Evolution of Cancer Clones.” BioRxiv. https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.04.16.439912
- Gataric, Milana, Jun Sung Park, Tong Li, Vasy Vaskivskyi, Jessica Svedlund, Carina Strell, Kenny Roberts, et al. 2021. “PoSTcode: Probabilistic Image-Based Spatial Transcriptomics Decoder.” BioRxiv. https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.10.12.464086
Select awards
- Recipient, EBI-Sanger Postdoctoral (ESPOD) Fellowship, 2019-22
- Finalist, Charles J. Epstein Trainee Award for Excellence in Human Genetics Research, American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG), 2018
- Recipient, National Presidential Science Fellowship, Korea Student Aid Foundation, 2009-14
