Publications by authors named "Young-Lok Cha"

Article Synopsis
  • Succinic acid is important for food additives, dietary supplements, and biodegradable polymers, and its production has gained interest due to environmental and economic factors.
  • The study improved succinic acid production from lignocellulosic biomass by genetically modifying strains to overexpress specific genes, leading to a 1.3-fold increase in production.
  • Fed-batch fermentation produced 50 g/l of succinic acid, and batch fermentation from barley straw yielded 22.2 g/l, suggesting that using agricultural waste for succinic acid production could be a sustainable industrial approach.
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Article Synopsis
  • Shinorine is a UV-protective compound used in cosmetics and pharmaceuticals, but scaling up its production industrially has been challenging despite the creation of modified strains.
  • The study introduced specific genes into a strain named DXdT to enhance the conversion of sedoheptulose 7-phosphate into mycosporine-glycine, a precursor for shinorine, and then used a new ligase to produce shinorine.
  • The engineered strain achieved significant yields of shinorine using lignocellulosic byproducts, demonstrating the potential for sustainable production from agricultural waste materials.
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This work aimed to evaluate the feasibility of biohydrogen production from Barley Straw and Miscanthus. The primary obstacle in plant biomass decomposition is the recalcitrance of the biomass itself. Plant cell walls consist of cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin, which make the plant robust to decomposition.

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Background: With a growing market for functional foods, the nutraceutical properties of hemp sprouts have been investigated in recent studies. However, commercial mass production methods have yet to be developed. This study aimed to identify seed sizes suitable for segregating ripe seeds, which would improve the low germination rate in the high seed densities used in commercial hemp sprout production.

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In this study, highly biocompatible three-dimensional hierarchically porous activated carbon from the low-cost silver grass (Miscanthus sacchariflorus) has been fabricated through a facile carbonization approach and tested it as bioanode in microbial fuel cell (MFC) using Escherichia coli as biocatalyst. This silver grass-derived activated carbon (SGAC) exhibited an unprecedented specific surface area of 3027 m g with the coexistence of several micro-, meso-, and macropores. The synergistic effect from pore structure (macropores - hosting E.

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Lignin nano-/microstructures are widely employed for agricultural drug delivery and heavy metal removal from wastewater, and facile low-cost methods of their large-scale production are therefore highly sought after. Herein, uniform-morphology polydisperse lignin microspheres were directly extracted from black liquor by lowering its pH to <4 followed by hydrothermal treatment and featured several lignin-typical characteristics, e.g.

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The use of rapeseed ( L.) or leaf mustard ( L. Czern) meal or both as organic fertilizer not only improves the soil environment and crop productivity by supplying nutrients but also has nematicidal effects.

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Even though industrial yeast strains exhibit numerous advantageous traits for the production of bioethanol, their genetic manipulation has been limited. This study demonstrates that an industrial polyploidy Saccharomyces cerevisiae JHS200 can be engineered through Cas9 (CRISPR associated protein 9)-based genome editing. Specifically, we generated auxotrophic mutants and introduced a xylose metabolic pathway into the auxotrophic mutants.

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Miscanthus sacchariflorus 'Goedae-Uksae 1' (GU) was developed as an energy crop of high productivity in Korea. For the practical use of GU for bioethanol production, a bench-scale continuous pretreatment system was developed. The reactor performed screw extrusion, soaking and thermochemical pretreatment at the following operating conditions: 3 mm particle size, 22% moisture content, 140 °C reaction temperature, 8 min residence time, 15 g/min biomass feeding and 120 mL/min NaOH input.

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A CO2-added ammonia explosion pretreatment was performed for bioethanol production from rice straw. The pretreatment conditions, such as ammonia concentration, CO2 loading level, residence time, and temperature were optimized using response surface methodology. The response for optimization was defined as the glucose conversion rate.

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Miscanthus is referred to as an ideal lignocellulosic bioenergy crop, which can be used to generate heat, power, and fuel, as well as to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. The new Miscanthus sacchariflorus genotype named Geodae-Uksae 1 was recently collected from damp land in southern Korea. This study investigated the growth characteristics of Miscanthus genotypes, and developed a specific, sensitive, and reproducible sequence characterized amplified region (SCAR) marker to distinguish new M.

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The sequence-characterized amplified region (SCAR) marker for simultaneous identification of Miscanthus sacchariflorus, Miscanthus sinensis, and Miscanthus x giganteus was developed. In this study, it was attempted for the first time to develop the SCAR marker for detecting the molecular phenotypes among Miscanthus species. Randomly amplified polymorphic DNA technique was applied for this study and one fragment which is unique to M.

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