Sangjin Kim

Biography

Professor Kim studied chemistry as an undergraduate student in Seoul National University in South Korea and received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2010 under the supervision of X. Sunney Xie. Her thesis research on single molecule biophysics uncovered "DNA allostery," by which DNA-bound proteins can affect each other's DNA binding properties at a distance (Science, 2013). To study how single molecules function inside cells, Professor Kim switched her research area to microbiology and conducted her postdoctoral research in Christine Jacobs-Wagner's lab at Yale University. She studied spatio-temporal regulation of transcription, translation, and mRNA degradation in bacterial cells using both experimental and computational approaches. She joined the Department of Physics at Illinois in January, 2019 and is excited to combine her expertise in single molecule biophysics, microbiology and computational modeling to study the complexity of living cells at the single-molecule and single-cell levels.

Selected Articles in Journals

• Kim, S., Beltran, B., Irnov, I., Jacobs-Wagner, C. (2018) "RNA polymerases display collaborative and antagonistic group behaviors over long distances through DNA supercoiling." bioRxiv, 433698.
• Kim, S., Jacobs-Wagner, C. (2018) "Effects of mRNA degradation and site-specific transcriptional pausing on protein expression noise." Biophys. J. 114: 1718-1729.
• Kim, S., Brostromer, E., Xing, D., Jin, J., Chong, S., Ge, H., Wang, S., Gu, C., Yang, L., Gao, Y., Su, X., Sun, Y., Xie, X.S. (2013) "Probing allostery through DNA."  Science 339: 816-819.
• Kim, S., Schroeder, C.M., Xie, X.S. (2010) "Single-molecule study of DNA polymerization activity of HIV-1 reverse transcriptase on DNA templates." J. Mol. Biol. 395: 995-1006.
• Kim, S., Blainey, P.C., Schroeder, C.M., Xie, X.S. (2007) "Multiplexed single-molecule assay for en-zymatic activity on ow-stretched DNA." Nat. Methods 4: 397-399.