Jin Zhang
Builds fluorescent biosensors that show where and when signalling enzymes are active inside living cells; senior author of TORCAR, an early live-cell reporter of mTORC1
Vice Chair and Professor of Pharmacology, UC San Diego School of Medicine (also Bioengineering and Chemistry & Biochemistry) · PhD, University of Chicago
Jin Zhang Lab, UC San Diego (La Jolla, California, USA) ↗
Portrait: Department of Pharmacology, UC San Diego
Jin Zhang studied chemistry at Tsinghua University, earned her PhD at the University of Chicago and trained as a postdoc with Roger Tsien and Susan Taylor at UC San Diego. She led a lab at Johns Hopkins from 2003 and moved it back to UC San Diego in 2015. Her group makes genetically encoded sensors, proteins that glow differently when a particular kinase touches them, and uses them to map signalling inside single cells.
TORCAR, from her Johns Hopkins lab, applied that approach to mTORC1. It showed mTORC1 activity in several places at once (lysosome, cytosol, nucleus, plasma membrane) and showed that growth factors and amino acids light up different sets of those places. Watching mTORC1 in real time in one cell is the kind of measurement that later studies of mTORC1 oscillation depend on.
Milestones in the Atlas
| Year | Evidence | Study |
|---|---|---|
| 2015 | M | Dynamic Visualization of mTORC1 Activity in Living Cells ZHO2015 Senior author on TORCAR, an early genetically encoded reporter of mTORC1 activity, which showed signal-specific mTORC1 activity in different parts of living cells. |
Co-authors in the Atlas
People with a profile here who share at least one study with Jin Zhang.
- Xin Zhou Built TORCAR, an early genetically encoded FRET reporter that lets mTORC1 activity be watched in living cells