Jimann Shin, Ph.D. is an instructor in Lilianna Solnica-Krezel laboratory at the Washington University in St. Louis. He is an expert in modeling human variants using zebrafish for the Model Organism Screening Center (MOSC) unit of the Undiagnosed Disease Network (UDN) and has been instrumental in developing and studying the zebrafish modeling FAM177A1 associated disease, understanding the function and developing tools for therapeutic development.

 

Jimann obtained his scientific training at Kyungpook National University, in South Korea, through undergraduate and master's programs. He investigated the role of Wnt signaling during brain development in the zebrafish model. During his Ph.D. training at Vanderbilt University, he developed several zebrafish transgenic lines including olig2:EGFP, and employed them to study how oligodendrocytes, the myelinating cell type of the central nervous system (CNS), develop from the ventral spinal cord.  His Ph.D. work showed that ventral spinal cord precursors produce several types of interneurons in addition to motoneurons and oligodendrocytes. Subsequently, many groups employed the olig2:EGFP transgenic line to study oligodendrocyte-related diseases such as multiple sclerosis. As a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Look’s laboratory in the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Dr. Shin studied the in vivo function of Neurofibromatosis type I (NF1) tumor suppressor gene implicated in glioblastoma and neuroblastoma tumorigenesis.  By creating NF1 loss-of-function zebrafish mutants using ZFN-induced mutagenesis, he showed that loss of nf1 contributes to tumorigenesis as demonstrated by an accelerated onset and increased penetrance of high-grade glioma in combination with p53 loss. After joining Lilianna Solnica-Krezel laboratory at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Dr. Shin adopted the TALE nuclease (TALEN) system to generate several chemokine GPCR mutants. He also developed an efficient method for homologous recombination mediated genome engineering.