So Young Bae Receives Invitation and Award to Speak at the American Crystallographic Association in Chicago
PhD student So Young Bae received a Travel Award to present her research at the 2025 American Crystallographic Association (ACA) Annual Meeting, held July 18–23 in Lombard, just outside Chicago, Illinois. Her work was selected for both a 30-minute oral presentation and a poster presentation and marked a notable achievement in the field of structural biology of ketohexokinase.
Bae delivered her oral presentation in this highly competitive “Cool Structures” session on Tuesday, July 22, titled, “Dual Substrate Binding Stabilizes the Catalytic State in Ketohexokinase.” Her research demonstrated that the enzyme ketohexokinase (KHK), essential in fructose metabolism, reaches its active form only when both ATP and fructose are bound—supporting a dual-substrate induced-fit mechanism. These findings have implications for understanding and potentially targeting metabolic disorders such as Type-2 diabetes, obesity, and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.
In her poster presentation, “Structural Insights into E. coli Fructose-1-Phosphate Kinase Reveal Evolutionary Divergence within the PfkB Family,” Bae shared a high-resolution crystal structure of the bacterial enzyme from the FruK gene. Her analysis shed light on how bacterial sugar kinases differ structurally and functionally from their human counterparts.
Bae’s research was conducted under the mentorship of Dr. Dean R. Tolan and Dr. Karen N. Allen and supported by NIH and Series-A funding from a small pharmaceutical company, exemplifying the departments’ strengths in interdisciplinary and translational structural biology.