Park Yun Seo, a Master's student in the Department of Biofermentation Convergence at Kookmin University (Advisor: Professor Park Yong Cheol), was awarded the Carol D. Litchfield Outstanding Student Poster Presentation Award at the 75th Annual Meeting of the Society for Industrial Microbiology and Biotechnology (SIMB), held in San Francisco, California, USA, from July 27-30. This recognition was granted for the academic excellence of the poster she presented. SIMB annually selects one outstanding student presenter from each of five core areas of industrial microbiology and biotechnology (biocatalysis, environmental microbiology, fermentation and cell culture, metabolic engineering, and natural products) to receive this award.

Park Yun Seo presented a case study on the metabolic engineering of Corynebacterium glutamicum, a safe microorganism applicable to the food industry, and the development of a strain capable of mass-producing Lacto-N-triose II (LNTII) and Lacto-N-tetraose (LNT), two human milk oligosaccharides known to be extremely difficult to synthesize artificially. Human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs) are representative human-derived functional oligosaccharides and a food ingredient showing steep growth, particularly in the infant formula market. This research significantly enhanced the final LNT production yield of the existing C. glutamicum by approximately 800-fold, based on the integration of advanced metabolic engineering and fermentation technology. It is evaluated as having laid the academic foundation to elevate the highly challenging biosynthetic technology for HMOs to a commercial level.

Professor Park Yong Cheol's research team at Kookmin University, supported by the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs, is dedicated to developing biological production technology for human milk oligosaccharides in collaboration with AP Technology, Dongguk University, and Chungbuk National University.