Kuo-Chiang Hsia

B.S., Fu Jen Catholic University
M.S., National Yang-Ming University
Architecture of a Coat for the Nuclear Pore Membrane
presented by André Hoelz (on behalf of Günter Blobel)

Kuo was born in Taiwan. He received a master of science degree from the National Yang-Ming University in Taipei in 2000 and continued to work there until he entered our graduate program in 2005.

Kuo came here well prepared with half a dozen excellent publications in the field of x-ray crystallography to his credit. He continued in this field when he joined our laboratory in 2005, taking on the nuclear pore complex (NPC). Solving the atomic structure of the entire NPC — a humongous and very dynamic protein assembly at the interface between the cytoplasm and the nucleus — is, for many reasons, impossible with present technology. Our laboratory embarked on an approach to solve the structure of bits in the hope to eventually piece them together. Kuo provided critical support on the feasibility of this approach. In a tour de force, he solved the structure of two interacting nucleoporins. The data allowed us not only to make predictions on the structure of a related pair of nucleoporins, but also led to the proposal of a model of how those proteins might be arranged in the context of the NPC. This work was published in Cell. Kuo’s subsequent work then solved the structure of the related pair of nucleoporins and further substantiated the suggestion of the proposed context model. This work was published in Molecular Cell. Emboldened by his success, Kuo is now trying to crystallize much larger bits of the NPC, and in doing so, decided to continue to stay in our laboratory as a postdoctoral fellow.

While a graduate student here, Kuo married and became the father of two lovely children. His wife is a graduate student at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. I don’t know how both of them keep this extraordinary pace, but obviously they do very well!