Joo-Jin Park

Liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS) facilitates the formation of membraneless organelles within cells, with implications in various biological processes and disease states. AT-rich interactive domain-containing protein 1A (ARID1A) is a chromatin remodeling factor frequently associated with cancer mutations, yet its functional mechanism remains largely unknown. Here, we find that ARID1A harbors a prion-like domain (PrLD), which facilitates the formation of liquid condensates through PrLD-mediat

The selective survival advantage of culture-adapted human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) is a serious safety concern for their clinical application. With a set of hESCs with various passage numbers, we observed that a subpopulation of hESCs at late passage numbers was highly resistant to various cell death stimuli, such as YM155, a survivin inhibitor. Transcriptome analysis from YM155-sensitive (YM155S) and YM155-resistant (YM155R) hESCs demonstrated that BCL2L1 was highly expressed in YM155R hESC

Owing to the advances in genome editing technologies, research on human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) have recently undergone breakthroughs that enable precise alteration of desired nucleotide bases in hPSCs for the creation of isogenic disease models or for autologous ex vivo cell therapy. As pathogenic variants largely consist of point mutations, precise substitution of mutated bases in hPSCs allows researchers study disease mechanisms with "disease-in-a-dish" and provide functionally repaire

Precise genome editing in human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) has potential applications in isogenic disease modeling and ex vivo stem cell therapy, necessitating diverse genome editing tools. However, unlike differentiated somatic cells, hPSCs have unique cellular properties that maintain genome integrity, which largely determine the overall efficiency of an editing tool. Considering the high demand for prime editors (PEs), it is imperative to characterize the key molecular determinants of PE

Precise genome editing of human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) is crucial not only for basic science but also for biomedical applications such as <i>ex vivo</i> stem cell therapy and genetic disease modeling. However, hPSCs have unique cellular properties compared to somatic cells. For instance, hPSCs are extremely susceptible to DNA damage, and therefore Cas9-mediated DNA double-strand breaks (DSB) induce p53-dependent cell death, resulting in low Cas9 editing efficiency. Unlike Cas9 nucleases,

Precise genome editing is crucial for establishing isogenic human disease models and ex vivo stem cell therapy from the patient-derived hPSCs. Unlike Cas9-mediated knock-in, cytosine base editor and prime editor achieve the desirable gene correction without inducing DNA double strand breaks. However, hPSCs possess highly active DNA repair pathways and are particularly susceptible to p53-dependent cell death. These unique characteristics impede the efficiency of gene editing in hPSCs. Here, we de

The recent advances in human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) enable to precisely edit the desired bases in hPSCs to be used for the establishment of isogenic disease models and autologous ex vivo cell therapy. The knock-in approach based on the homologous directed repair with Cas9 endonuclease, causing DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs), produces not only insertion and deletion (indel) mutations but also deleterious large deletions. On the contrary, due to the lack of Cas9 endonuclease activity, bas

Since the identification of DNA as a genetic material, manipulating DNA in various organisms has been a long standing dream of humanity. In pursuit of this objective, technologies to edit genome have been extensively developed over the recent decades. The emergence of zinc finger nuclease (ZFN), transcription activator-like effector nuclease (TALEN), and clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) and CRISPR-associated (Cas) systems enabled site-specific DNA cleavage in a

Abstract The prime editing 2 (PE2) system comprises a nickase Cas9 fused to a reverse transcriptase utilizing a prime editing guide RNA (pegRNA) to introduce desired mutations at target genomic sites. However, the PE efficiency is limited by mismatch repair (MMR) that excises the DNA strand containing desired edits. Thus, inhibiting key components of MMR complex through transient expression of a dominant negative MLH1 (MLH1dn) exhibited approximately 7.7-fold increase in PE efficiency over PE2,

In the Acknowledgements section of this article, the grant number relating to the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety was incorrectly given as #1475014063 and should have been 22202MFDS127. The original article has been corrected.