Natural Products Metabolomics Lab @ Sookmyung Women's University

Latest News

February 23, 2024

Congratulations Taekyoung on your M.Sc. graduation and outstanding thesis award!

January 19, 2024

Our lab published a review article about mass spectrometry-based ginsenoside profiling in Journal of Ginseng Research. In addition to summarizing the previous works, we present our results of untargeted and targeted ginsenoside profiling of different genotypes cultivated under identical conditions, which were made in the late Prof. Sang Hyun Sung's lab 6 years ago under a collaborative project with Prof. Tae-Jin Yang's lab(Seoul National University).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jgr.2024.01.004

November 2–3, 2023

Our lab participated in the 2023 Annual Meeting of The Korean Society of Pharmacognosy held in Seoul.

Kyungha won the best poster award, and also won the second prize (an Illy coffee machine) in the lucky draw. Double congratulations!

October 30 – November 3, 2023

Prof. Mehdi Beniddir and Sarah Szwarc (Université Paris-Saclay, France), and  Prof. Amit Jaisi (Walailak University, Thailand) visited our lab for discussions on our collaborative projects on monoterpene indole alkaloids.

We had a great time consisting of the wonderful science and beauty of autumn in Seoul. Mehdi and Amit gave great talks at the Korean Society of Pharmacognosy meeting!

August 12–20, 2023

Kyo Bin visited Dr. Daniel Petras's group at the University of Tübingen, where Huong and Eunah has already been for 3 weeks as visiting students. 

See the Petras group web page where our photos are posted in the Alumni section! :D

July 26, 2023

Just after the ASP meeting, Huong and Eunah left for Tübingen, Germany. They will stay at Dr. Daniel Petras's group at the University of Tübingen as visiting students for a month and work on our collaborative projects for native metabolomics on xenobiotics biotransformants.

* This visiting research is supported by the NRF's 'Korea-Germany R&D Network Program.'

July 22–26, 2023

Kyo Bin and 4 PhD students, Huong, Eunah, Kyungha, and Yukyung, participated in the 2023 Annual Meeting of American Society of Pharmacognosy (ASP), held in Rockville, Maryland, USA. Kyo Bin gave a contributed talk, and students presented their own results as posters. 

Huong and Eunah were awarded Lynn Brady Student Travel Award consisting of an honorarium of USD 600. Congratulations!

July 1722, 2023

Kyo Bin visited Prof. Mehdi Beniddir's group at Université Paris-Saclay, where Kyungha has already been for 3 weeks as a visiting student. 

Kyo Bin and Kyungha participated in 6th AFERP (Association Francophone pour l’Enseignement et la Recherche en Pharmacognosie) International Symposium. and Kyo Bin gave an invited talk. 

After the symposium, we had an intensive discussion about our collaborative project on monoterpene indole alkaloids, with Mehdi's group and our dear friend Prof. Justin van der Hooft (Wageningen University, Netherlands).

July 3, 2023

Eunah published her first first-authored paper in PNAS!

Here we suggest mass spectrometry-based metabolomics as a powerful method for phenotyping of microbial biotransformation, and demonstrated the efficiency of the method by discovering a UDP-xylosyltransferase with a substrate promiscuity from a wood-decaying fungus Lentinus brumalis.

Eunah did the key experimental parts of this study as her master thesis work, and successfully finalized the project with additional efforts for one more year. Congratulations!


https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2301007120 

*highlighted in BRIC 한빛사: Eunah's interview can be found here (Korean)

June 25, 2023

Kyungha left for Paris, France. She will stay at Prof. Mehdi Beniddir's group at Université Paris-Saclay as a visiting student for a month and work on our collaborative projects for metabolomics on monoterpene indole alkaloids.

* This visiting research is supported by the NRF international cooperative grant program titled 'Science and Technology Amicable Relationships (South Korea-France).'

June 21–23, 2023

Our lab participated in the 2023 Annual Meeting of The Korean Society for Microbiology and Biotechnology held in Gyeongju.

Kyo Bin gave an invited talk at the International Symposium Session titled "Microbial Natural Products in Drug Discovery".

Our lab also had a  great time with Prof. Chung Sub Kim's lab at Sungkyunkwan University, having dinner together.

May 19, 2023

Kyo Bin gave an invited talk at the Phytochemical Society of Europe (PSE) meeting 2023 held in Seoul National University.

April 2021, 2023

Our lab participated in the 2023 Spring International Convention of the Pharmaceutical Society of Korea held in Gyeongju.

Kyungha gave a 5-min talk about her project in monoterpene indole alkaloids. Congratulations!

April 67, 2023

Our lab participated in the 2023 Annual Symposium of the Korea Metabolomics Society held in Seoul.

March 23, 2023

Kyungha published her first first-authored paper in ACS Omega! Collaborating with Prof. Hangun Kim at Sunchon National University, we found phthalide derivatives that inhibit human umbilical vein endothelial cell motility by suppressing mRNA expressions of genes regulating epithelial cell survival and motility from an endolichenic fungus Arthrinium sp. EL000127. 


https://doi.org/10.1021/acsomega.3c00876 

February 24, 2023

Congratulations Kyungha and Dayoung on M.Sc. graduation!

December 22, 2022

Our lab is awarded an international cooperative grant named <Korea-Germany R&D Network Program>. We will collaborate with Dr. Daniel Petras's lab at University of Tübingen to establish a functional metabolomics platform to reveal biological effects of human xenobiotic metabolites.

November 34, 2022

Our lab participated in 2022 Annual Conference of the Korean Sciety of Pharmacognosy, at Ewha Womans University.


Kyo Bin won the Young Researcher Award (젊은 생약학자상), and Dayoung won the Excellent Poster Award!

October 1921, 2022

Our lab participated in 2022 Fall International Convention of the Pharmaceutical Society of Korea, which was held in Jeju.


Kyo Bin gave an invited talk, and Eunah had a chance to give her first time conference talk for 5-min. Congratulations!

August 27, 2022

Here we publish a data descriptor on a LC-MS/MS dataset of 337 medicinal plants used in traditional East Asian medicine in Scientific Data, collaborating with Prof. Sang Hee Shim at Seoul National University. We expect this dataset would be applied for multiple purpose, including drug discovery and quality control. As Prof. Pieter Dorrestein highlighted in a recent paper, reference-data-driven analysis will be a next-generation workflow in metabolomics. Plant natural products have attracted interests of many researchers, but there have not many publicly available datasets. In addition to the raw dataset, we built a reference library of 233 phytochemicals from a legacy library of retired Prof. Sam Sik Kang, who studied plant natural products for > 30 yrs.


https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-022-01662-2

August 24, 2022

Our lab renovated the research space.

August 18–19, 2022

Our lab participated in 2022 Korean Sciety of Pharmacognosy Symposium on Crude Drug Resources. Had a great time in Jeju!

July 23–28, 2022

Houng and Eunah represent our lab in 2022 ASP (American Society of Pharmacognosy) annual meeting in Charleston, South Carolina!

May 25, 2020

Today was Kyo Bin's birthday; and we were informed that now we are a part of the Muscle Physiome Research Center (MPRC), funded by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF)'s medical research center (MRC) team grant for 7 years!

March 30–April 1, 2022

Our lab participated in the 2022 Annual Symposium of the Korea Metabolomics Society, which was held in Busan, Korea.


+ Conference = new lab photos!

February 25, 2022

Congratulations Eunjin and Eunah on M.Sc. graduation!

Eunah won this semester's outstanding thesis award.

January 25, 2022

Huong published her work on specialized metabolites induced by a non-antagonistic co-culture between mushroom-forming fungi in Journal of Natural Products! This work was the major theme of her master thesis.

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jnatprod.1c01022

January 6, 2022

Our first publication in this year came out in Analytical Chemistry!  In this study, we demonstrated that MS/MS molecular networking is a powerful and efficient tool for detecting drug metabolites from LC-MS datasets, by comparing molecular networking with other commercial software.

Special thanks to Mr. Jun Sang Yu and Prof. Hye Hyun Yoo (Hanyang University) for the collaborative efforts on this work.

https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.analchem.1c04925

December 20-22, 2021

Our lab participated in 2021 Fall International Convention of the Pharmaceutical Society of Korea.

Huong's abstract was selected for a 5-min talk in the young scientist's session, so she gave her first time conference talk. Congratulations!


+ Conference = new lab photos!

November 8, 2021

Finally we could take graduation pictures with Huong. Congratulations again!


September 29, 2021

Our lab is awarded an international cooperative grant named <Science and Technology Amicable Relationships (South Korea-France)>! We will collaborate with Prof. Mehdi Beniddir's group at Université Paris-Saclay to discover bioactive monoterpene indole alkaloids from plants, applying untargeted MS/MS-based metabolomics approaches.

August 25, 2021

Huong finished her Msc, winning the University outstanding thesis award. The current COVID-19 situation did not allow us to take any graduation cap and gown pictures... but congratulations Huong!!

She will continue following her scientific endeavor on natural product chemistry in our lab as a PhD student.


Thesis title: Sesquiterpenes induced by the co-cultivation of Phellinus orientoasiaticus and Schizopora flavipora

June 18, 2021

Our latest review paper is published in Natural Product Reports! Here we described our vision on the future of MS- and NMR-based computational metabolomics approaches for metabolite annotation.

This review was written as an international collaboration with colleagues from all around the world: Mehdi Beniddir (Paris-Saclay University, France),Grégory Genta-Jouve (Université De Guyane, French Guiana), Florian Huber (Netherlands eScience Center, The Netherlands), Simon Rogers (University of Glasgow, UK), and Justin J. J. van der Hooft (Wageningen University, The Netherlands).

https://doi.org/10.1039/D1NP00023C

March 31 - April 2, 2021

Our lab participated in 2021 Annual Symposium of the Korea Metabolomics Society, which was held in Jeju, Korea.

March 1, 2021

Yesterday was Sunmin's last day in our lab. She will move to the Quave lab at Emory University as a postdoc and keep pursuing her enthusiasm in natural product chemistry. 

Thanks for a lot of works and helps Sunmin provided for the last 6 months!

February 3, 2021

Our paper on the sample prioritization strategy based on estimation of scaffold uniqueness applying a LC-MS/MS-based metabolomics pipeline is published in Journal of Natural Products!

Special thanks to Prof. Woo Young Kim (Sookmyung Women's University), Prof. Young Woon Lim (Seoul National University),  and Prof. Ki Hyun Kim (Sungkyunkwan University) for the collaborative efforts.

And a huge congratulations Huong for her first first-authored paper!

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jnatprod.0c00977

December 12, 2020

Sunmin gave a great talk in young scientist session of the e-conference of Korean Society of Pharmacognosy!  She presented the results from her PhD works on selaginellin derivatives from Selaginella tamariscina.

November 6, 2020

Our paper on the genetic and chemical diversity of Taraxacum plants occurring in the Korean Peninsula is now published in Phytochemitry!

This study started as a collaborative study between the late Prof. Sang Hyun Sung's lab and Prof. Tae-Jin Yang's lab in Seoul National University 5 years ago. Thanks and congratulations to everyone who contributed to this work, especially Dr. Yun Sun Lee, MS. Jinkyung Kim, and Dr. Sunmin Woo.


https://doi.org/10.1016/j.phytochem.2020.112576

September 1, 2020

Dr. Sunmin Woo joined our lab as a new postdoctoral researcher. Welcome!

July 31, 2020

A new LC-MS system (Waters Vion IMS QToF) is starting to be installed in our lab!!

July 10, 2020

Kyo Bin gave the first Korean GNPS workshop as a part of 2020 Summer Symposium of the Korean Society of Pharmacognosy, which was held as an online symposium. More than 100 researchers participated in the workshop. We expect this workshop will expand the GNPS community and spread the concept of open data science in Korea!

March 2, 2020

Two new master course students, Eun Jin and Eun Ah,  joined our lab. Welcome!

February 26, 2020

Now it is official! Our lab will be supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant for applying an integrated genome-mining and metabolomics workflow for drug discovery from massive fungal strain collections for 5 years! Stay tunes for how awesome sciences will come from our lab!

February 13, 2020

First publication alert in 2020! Our group's is now available in Phytochemistry! It describes a showcase on how we can use LC-MS/MS data analysis workflows recently developed in GNPS, such as MolNetEnhancer, Chemical Structural and Compositional Similarity, and Bioactivity networking to reveal chemical diversity and predict bioactive components from multiple number of plant extracts. 


https://doi.org/10.1016/j.phytochem.2020.112292 

January 10, 2020

Kyo Bin participated this winter's Tiny Earth Partner Instructor training which was held in Madison, Wisconsin, USA. Tiny Earth is a network of instructors and students focused on student-sourcing antibiotic discovery from soil. As a partner lab of Tiny Earth, we will open a discovery-oriented lab class for undergraduate students in the next fall semester, and will apply microbiological diversity found in the class into the antibiotics discovery in our lab.


More information about Tiny Earth can found in: 

https://tinyearth.wisc.edu/ 

December 30, 2019

Our lab's first dinner event for saying goodbye to 2019, and saying goodbye to Dr. Seung -Yun Oh who will be back to Suncheon National University.

His visiting in our lab was full of fun and awesome science; very interesting findings from our collaborative works  on lichen collections will be out soon!

August 30, 2019

Today was the last day of our 5 undergraduate students' summer internship. As first members of our lab, they helped a lot of works for several projects. Thanks everyone!

Although they leave, the lab will not be empty; from the next month, two new members  will join the lab! 

A Vietnamese student Thi Huong Pham flied to Seoul and started her Master course from this month, and Seung-Yoon Oh, who is a mycologist and is working as a postdoc in Korean Lichen Research Institute, will stay in our lab as a visiting researcher for three months. 

Welcome newcomers!

June 22, 2019

Our latest paper is available at Journal of Natural Products! It describes the prioritization and targeted isolation of selaginellin derivatives from Selaginella tamariscina, and their biological evaluation against PDE-4 activity. It's a showcase of how you can use MS/MS molecular networking for targeting a specific molecular scaffold of interest even when you don't have any related compound or reference spectrum. Especially thanks to Ms. Sunmin Woo (Seoul National University) for her contribution to this study!


https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jnatprod.9b00049 

June 1, 2019

Please to announce that our group won the research grant project titled "Bioactive natural product discovery from Polyporaceae mushrooms based on metabolites profiling", which is supported by National Research Foundation of Korea. We will investigate on the chemical diversity of Polyporaceae mushrooms, many species of which have been used in East Asian traditional medicines, using mass spectrometry-based metabolomics techniques!

Feb 20, 2019

Our new paper is now out in the Plant Journal! It describes an integrated data analysis workflow for comprehensive and automated metabolite annotation in untargeted metabolomics studies dealing with massive MS/MS dataset.


https://doi.org/10.1111/tpj.14292

Sep 1, 2018

Hello, world!

Our lab launched at College of Pharmacy, Sookmyung Women's University, Seoul, Korea.