Bio-X Graduate Student Fellow

Awarded in 2015
Home Department: Applied Physics
Faculty Advisors: Joseph Puglisi (Structural Biology) and Zev Bryant (Bioengineering)

Research Title: Understanding modulation in translation elongation dynamics that changes decoding of the genetic code

Research Description: In all organisms, translation is the last stage of information transfer from Photo of Junhong Choi.genes to proteins. Translation involves interactions between many factors including messenger RNAs, carriers of genetic information from DNA, and ribosomes, bio-machines that read messenger RNAs and synthesize corresponding proteins. However, little is known about how translation is altered by biologically relevant obstacles such as chemical modifications of mRNA, structured parts of mRNA, and other translating ribosomes on mRNA. Choi proposes to expand currently available single-molecule biophysical tools to observe how these obstacles affect translational dynamics.

WHERE IS HE NOW?

Junhong received the K99/R00 grant from NHGRI, NIH. In 2024, he will be moving to Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center to be an assistant member of the Sloan-Kettering Institute.