Ji-Man Park

Autophagy researcher in Do-Hyung Kim's University of Minnesota lab who mapped how the kinase ULK1 starts autophagy, and lead author of work showing that AMPK can hold ULK1 back under energy stress

Department of Biochemistry, Molecular Biology and Biophysics, University of Minnesota (papers with Do-Hyung Kim, 2013–2023)

Ji-Man Park is the first author of PAR2023, a Nature Communications paper from Do-Hyung Kim's lab at the University of Minnesota. Autophagy is the cell's recycling system: it wraps worn-out parts in a membrane and breaks them down. The kinase ULK1 starts the process. A textbook model said that AMPK, the cell's energy sensor, switches ULK1 on when energy runs low. In cultured cells starved of glucose or with poisoned mitochondria, the team found the opposite: AMPK held ULK1 and autophagy back. AMPK also shielded the ULK1 machinery from being cut up by caspases, enzymes active in cell death, so autophagy could restart later. This challenges a common reading of how energy stress and autophagy are linked, though it comes from cell culture.

Park's PubMed record shows a long run of ULK1 work in the same lab. As first author, Park showed in 2016 that ULK1 binds and phosphorylates ATG14, a step that passes the mTORC1 signal on to the autophagy machinery, and in 2018 that ULK1 phosphorylates BECN1 (Beclin 1) on serine 30 to drive autophagy. Park also contributed to the lab's 2014 Molecular Cell paper showing that mTORC1 phosphorylates UVRAG to slow autophagosome maturation, and co-wrote a 2023 commentary in Autophagy titled "A paradigm shift: AMPK negatively regulates ULK1 activity".

All of these papers list the University of Minnesota. No official profile page was found, so the current position could not be confirmed; the affiliation shown is the one on the Atlas paper.

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