Jinseung Jeong: Plant Physiology First Author
Jinseung Jeong, first author of “GREEN FLUORESCENT PROTEIN variants with enhanced folding are more efficiently imported into chloroplasts”
Current Position: Researcher, Sanigen Co., Ltd. R&D Center, Korea
Education: Bachelor degree (Department of Bioenergy Science and Technology, Chonnam National University, Gwangju, Korea); Master degree (Department of Integrative Food, Bioscience and Biotechnology, Chonnam National University, Gwangju, Korea)
Brief Bio:
When I was 4th year undergraduate student, I became interested in plant cell biology. Therefore, immediately after graduating from university, I joined the lab of Prof. Dong Wook Lee as a graduate student, and investigated how protein folding propensity affects protein import into chloroplast and mitochondria. It has been regarded that preprotein unfolding is prerequisite for protein import into chloroplast and mitochondria. However, our results clearly reflect a novel perspective that chloroplast import machinery is very tolerant to various folding states of preproteins and even can import better-folding GFP variants more efficiently than normal GFP. In contrast, consistent with the previous studies, our results indicate that the mitochondrial machinery is specialized in the translocation of unfolded preproteins. I hope these findings will provide novel insight in understanding the mechanism of protein import into endosymbiotic organelles.
