Kim Lab

Research focus

ERC Starting Grant · 2021

The biology of syncytial cells: Dissecting the mechanisms and functions of nuclear differentiation inside skeletal muscle syncytium

Due to their cellular anatomy, syncytial cells face many unique challenges that mono-nucleated cells do not. One of them is how syncytial cells organize gene expression among many nuclei in a shared cytoplasm. How such property is linked to their biological functions remains poorly understood. Using the skeletal muscle as a paradigm and single-nucleus transcriptomics, I recently uncovered previously unrecognized diversity and dynamics of myonuclear transcriptional programs. This conceptualized the syncytial muscle cell itself as an analog of multi-cellular tissue where individual nuclei are counterparts of differentiated cell types. My findings raise two important and unanswered questions.…

From the public funding record at EU CORDIS. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.