Inkyung Jung

Although most SARS-CoV-2-infected individuals experience mild coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), some patients suffer from severe COVID-19, which is accompanied by acute respiratory distress syndrome and systemic inflammation. To identify factors driving severe progression of COVID-19, we performed single-cell RNA-seq using peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) obtained from healthy donors, patients with mild or severe COVID-19, and patients with severe influenza. Patients with COVID-19 e

Three-dimensional (3D) chromatin structure is an emerging paradigm for understanding gene regulation mechanisms. Hi-C (high-throughput chromatin conformation capture), a method to detect long-range chromatin interactions, allows extensive genome-wide investigation of 3D chromatin structure. However, broad application of Hi-C data have been hindered by the level of complexity in processing Hi-C data and the large size of raw sequencing data. In order to overcome these limitations, we constructed

H2B monoubiquitylation (H2Bub1), which is required for multiple methylations of both H3K4 and H3K79, has been implicated in gene expression in numerous organisms ranging from yeast to human. However, the molecular crosstalk between H2Bub1 and other modifications, especially the methylations of H3K4 and H3K79, remains unclear in vertebrates. To better understand the functional role of H2Bub1, we measured genome-wide histone modification patterns in human cells. Our results suggest that H2Bub1 has

Three-dimensional (3D) genome organization is tightly coupled with gene regulation in various biological processes and diseases. In cancer, various types of large-scale genomic rearrangements can disrupt the 3D genome, leading to oncogenic gene expression. However, unraveling the pathogenicity of the 3D cancer genome remains a challenge since closer examinations have been greatly limited due to the lack of appropriate tools specialized for disorganized higher-order chromatin structure. Here, we

BACKGROUND: Post-translational modifications (PTMs) have a key role in regulating cell functions. Consequently, identification of PTM sites has a significant impact on understanding protein function and revealing cellular signal transductions. Especially, phosphorylation is a ubiquitous process with a large portion of proteins undergoing this modification. Experimental methods to identify phosphorylation sites are labor-intensive and of high-cost. With the exponentially growing protein sequence

In this study, we propose that a new class of super-enhancers may play an important role in the early establishment of 3D chromatin structure.

Clonal hematopoiesis of indeterminate potential (CHIP), a common aging-related process that predisposes individuals to various inflammatory responses, has been reported to be associated with COVID-19 severity. However, the immunological signature and the exact gene expression program by which the presence of CHIP exerts its clinical impact on COVID-19 remain to be elucidated. In this study, we generated a single-cell transcriptome landscape of severe COVID-19 according to the presence of CHIP us

BACKGROUND: Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) is a feature extraction method that has the property of intuitive part-based representation of the original features. This unique ability makes NMF a potentially promising method for biological sequence analysis. Here, we apply NMF to fold recognition and remote homolog detection problems. Recent studies have shown that combining support vector machines (SVM) with profile-profile alignments improves performance of fold recognition and remote hom

Epigenetic modifications are crucial regulators of gene expression that critically impact cell lineage differentiation, survival, and proliferation, and dysregulations are commonly observed in various cancers. The aberrantly modified epigenome confers unique features on tumor cells, including sustained proliferative potential, resistance to growth-suppressive or cell death signals, augmented replicative immortality, invasion, and metastasis. As a result, epigenetic abnormalities exhibit signific

The regulatory effect of non-coding large-scale structural variations (SVs) on proto-oncogene activation remains unclear. This study investigated SV-mediated gene dysregulation by profiling 3D cancer genome maps from 40 patients with colorectal cancer (CRC). We developed a machine learning-based method for spatial characterization of the altered 3D cancer genome. This revealed a frequent establishment of "de novo chromatin contacts" that can span multiple topologically associating domains (TADs)

Genetic differences inferred from sequencing reads can be used for demultiplexing of pooled single-cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq) data across multiple donors without WGS-based reference genotypes. However, such methods could not be directly applied to single-cell ATAC-seq (scATAC-seq) data owing to the lower read coverage for each variant compared to scRNA-seq. We propose a new software, scATAC-seq Variant-based EstimatioN for GEnotype ReSolving (scAVENGERS), which resolves this issue by calling more