Young Chul Kim
Cell biologist who studied mTOR and autophagy in Kun-Liang Guan's lab at UC San Diego and later moved to kidney research in Volker Vallon's group
Division of Nephrology and Hypertension, UC San Diego, and VA San Diego Healthcare System (papers with Volker Vallon, 2024–2026) · Department of Pharmacology and Moores Cancer Center, UC San Diego (Kun-Liang Guan lab, papers 2013–2015)
mTORC1, the cell's growth-control complex, only switches on when amino acids are around. Before 2015 the accepted route was the Rag GTPases, small switch proteins that bring mTORC1 to the surface of the lysosome. The Atlas study JEW2015 in Science, from Kun-Liang Guan's lab, showed that two amino acids use different routes. Leucine works through the Rags, but glutamine could still turn on mTORC1 in cells that lacked Rags, through a pathway that needed another small GTPase, Arf1. Young Chul Kim was second author. The work was done in cultured cells.
In the Guan lab Kim also wrote, with Guan, a 2015 review on mTOR as a drug target for controlling autophagy, the cell's recycling system, and co-authored studies on how the energy sensor AMPK steers different Vps34 complexes during starvation and on how Wnt signals switch on the growth regulators YAP and TAZ. The 2015 Cell paper already listed a second address at the Veterans Medical Research Foundation in San Diego.
Later PubMed records place Kim at the Division of Nephrology and Hypertension of UC San Diego and the VA San Diego Healthcare System, in Volker Vallon's group. That work studies the kidney: how diabetes, SGLT2 inhibitor drugs and GLP1 receptor drugs change gene activity in the proximal tubule, and how glucagon-receptor agonists affect kidney injury in mice.
Milestones in the Atlas
A selection, not a full bibliography: only papers that meet the Atlas inclusion criteria.
| Year | Evidence | Study |
|---|---|---|
| 2015 | M | Metabolism. Differential regulation of mTORC1 by leucine and glutamine JEW2015 Second author: helped show in cultured cells that glutamine can activate mTORC1 without the Rag GTPases, through Arf1, unlike leucine. |
Co-authors in the Atlas 3
People with a profile here who share at least one study with Young Chul Kim.
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- Hyun Woo Park Biochemist at Yonsei University who trained with Kun-Liang Guan on the Hippo-YAP/TAZ growth pathway and now studies how cancer cells change their signalling and metabolism to spread
- Jenna L. Jewell Studies how cells sense nutrients such as amino acids to control growth and metabolism through mTORC1
- Kun-Liang Guan Showed how growth-factor and energy signals reach mTORC1 through TSC2 and Rheb, and, in parallel with the Sabatini lab, that the Rag GTPases carry the amino-acid signal. His lab also found that AMPK and mTORC1 control autophagy by phosphorylating the kinase ULK1 at different sites
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