• Journal of Veterinary Science
• /
• v.21 no.5
• /
• pp.77.1-77.14
• /
• 2020

Background: Staphylococcus aureus is one of the main microorganisms that causes bovine mastitis, and its well-known virulence characteristics and interactions with the environment are used to aid the design of more efficient therapies. Objectives: To determine whether the virulence traits, such as antibiotic resistance and biofilm-forming and internalization abilities, of S. aureus isolated from bovine mastitis are related to dairy production system types. Methods: The study was performed in the Mexican states of Guanajuato and Michoacan. Semi-intensive dairy farms (SIDFs) and family dairy farms (FDFs) (454 and 363 cows, respectively) were included. The 194 milk samples from mastitis affected quarters were collected and 92 strains of S. aureus were isolated and identified by biochemical and molecular tests. Antibiotic resistance, biofilm and internalization assays were performed on 30 randomly selected isolated strains to determine virulence traits, and these strains were equally allocated to the 2 dairy production systems. Results: All 30 selected strains displayed a high degree of resistance (50%-91.7%) to the antibiotics tested, but no significant difference was found between SIDF and FDF isolates. S. aureus strains from SIDFs had an average biofilm forming capacity of up to 36% (18.9%-53.1%), while S. aureus strains from FDFs registered an average of up to 53% (31.5%-77.8%) (p > 0.05). Internalization assays revealed a higher frequency of internalization capacity for strains isolated from FDFs (33.3%) than for those isolated from SIDFs (6.7%) (p > 0.05). fnbpA gen was detected in 46.6% of FDF strains and 33.3% of SIDF strains, and this difference was significant (p < 0.05). Conclusions: Our findings show that the virulence traits of S. aureus isolates analyzed in this study, depend significantly on several factors, such as phenotype, genotype, and environmental conditions, which are significantly related to dairy production system type and daily management practices.

• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
• /
• v.26 no.1A
• /
• pp.55-65
• /
• 2006

This paper presents the closing analysis of a symmetric steel cable-stayed bridge erected by a free cantilever method. Two independent structural systems are formed before the closing procedure of a bridge is performed, and thus the compatibility conditions for vertical displacement and rotational angle are not satisfied at the closing section without the application of proper sectional forces. Since, however, it is usually impossible to apply sectional forces at the closing section, the compatibility conditions should be satisfied by proper external forces that can be actually applicable to a bridge. Unstrained lengths of selected cables and the pull-up force of a derrick crane are adjusted to satisfy nonlinear compatibility conditions, which are solved iteratively by the Newton-Raphson method. Cable members are modeled by the elastic catenary cable elements, and towers and main girders are discretized by linear 3-D frame elements. The sensitivities of displacement with respect to the unstrained lengths of selected cables and the pull-up force of the derrick crane are evaluated by the direct differentiation of the equilibrium equation. A Monte-Carlo simulation approach is proposed to estimate expected construction errors for a given confidence level. The proposed method is applied to the second Jindo Grand Bridge to demonstrate its validity and effectiveness.

• Journal of the Korean Chemical Society
• /
• v.68 no.3
• /
• pp.151-159
• /
• 2024

Indian spices are well known for their numerous health benefits, flavour, taste, and colour. Recent Advancements in chemical technology have led to better extraction and identification of bioactive molecules (phytochemicals) from spices. The therapeutic effects of spices against diabetes, cardiac problems, and various cancers has been well established. The present in silico study aims to investigate the binding affinity of 29 phytochemicals from 11 Indian spices with two prominent proteins, BCL3 and CXCL10 involved in invasiveness and bone metastasis of breast cancer. The three-dimensional structures of 29 phytochemicals were extracted from PubChem database. Protein Data Bank was used to retrieve the 3D structures of BCL3 and CXCL10 proteins. The drug-likeness and other properties of compounds were analysed by ADME and Lipinski rule of five (RO5). All computational simulations were carried out using Autodock 4.0 on Windows platform. The proteins were set to be rigid and compounds were kept free to rotate. In-silico study demonstrated a strong complex formation (positive binding constants and negative binding energy ΔG) between all phytochemicals and target proteins. However, piperine and sesamolin demonstrated high binding constants with BCL3 (50.681 × 10³ mol^-1, 137.76 × 10³ mol^-1) and CXCL10 (98.71 × 10³ mol^-1, 861.7 × 10³ mol^-1), respectively. The potential of these two phytochemicals as a drug candidate was highlighted by their binding energy of -6.5 kcal mol^-1, -7.1 kcal mol^-1 with BCL3 and -6.9 kcal mol^-1, -8.2 kcal mol^-1 with CXCL10, respectively coupled with their favourable drug likeliness and pharmacokinetics properties. These findings underscore the potential of piperine and sesamolin as drug candidates for inhibiting invasiveness and regulating breast cancer metastasis. However, further validation through in vitro and in vivo studies is necessary to confirm the in silico results and evaluate their clinical potential.

• Korean Journal of Veterinary Research
• /
• v.36 no.4
• /
• pp.783-794
• /
• 1996

It has been suggested that ion transport systems are intimately involved in mediating the effects of growth regulatory factors on the growth of a number of different types of animal cells in vivo. The functional importance of the apical membrane $Na^+/H^+$ antiporter in the renal proximal tubule is evidenced by estimates that this transporter mediates the reabsorption of approximately one third of the filtered load of sodium and the bulk of the secretion of hydrogen ions. This study was designed to investigate the pathway utilized by IGF-I in regulating sodium transport in primary cultured renal proximal tubule cells. Results were as follows : 1. $Na^+$ was observed to accumulate in the primary cells as a function of time. Raising the concentration of extracellular NaCl induced an decrease in $Na^+$ uptake compared with control cells in a dose dependent manner. The rate of $Na^+$ uptake into the primary cells was about two times higher in the absence of NaCl($40.11{\pm}1.76pmole\;Na^+/mg\;protein/min$) than in the presence of 140mM NaCl($17.82{\pm}0.94pmole\;Na^+/mg\;protein/min$) at the 30 minute uptake. 2. $Na^+$ uptake was inhibited by IAA($1{\times}10^{-4}M$) or valinomycin($5{\times}10^{-6}M$) treatment($50.51{\pm}4.04$ and $57.65{\pm}2.27$ of that of control, respectively). $Na^+$ uptake by the primary proximal tubule cells was significantly increased by ouabain($5{\times}10^{-5}M$) treatment($140.23{\pm}3.37%$ of that of control). When actinomycin D($1{\times}10^{-7}M$) or cycloheximide($4{\times}10^{-5}M$) was applied, $Na^+$ uptake was decreased to $90.21{\pm}2.39%$ or $89.64{\pm}3.69%$ of control in IGF-I($1{\times}10^{-5}M$) treated cells, respectively. 3. Extracellular cAMP decreased $Na^+$ uptake in a dose-dependent manner($10^{-8}-10^{-4}M$). IBMX($5{\times}10^{-5}M$) also inhibited $Na^+$ uptake. Treatment of cells with pertussis toxin(50pg/ml) or cholera toxin($1{\mu}g/ml$) inhibited $Na^+$ uptake. Extracellular PMA decreased $Na^+$ uptake in a dose-dependent manner(1-100ng/ml). 100 ng/ml PMA concentration significantly inhibited $Na^+$ uptake in IGF-I treated cells. However, staurosporine($1{\times}10^{-7}M$) had no effect on $Na^+$ uptake. When PMA and staurosporine were added together, the inhibition of $Na^+$ uptake was not observed. In conclusion, sodium uptake in primary cultured rabbit renal proximal tubule cells was dependent on membrane potentials and intracellular energy levels. IGF-I stimulates sodium uptake through mechanisms that involve some degree of de novo protein and/or RNA synthesis, and cAMP and/or PKC pathway mediating the action mechanisms of IGF-I.

• Progress in Medical Physics
• /
• v.20 no.4
• /
• pp.317-323
• /
• 2009

The standard dosimetry systems based on an absorbed dose to water recommend to use a planeparallel chamber for the calibration of such a low-megavoltage electron beam as a nominal energy of 6 MeV. For this energy ranges of an electron beam a cylindrical chamber should not be used for the routinely regular beam calibration, but the feasibility of the temporary use of a cylindrical chamber was studied to give temporary solutions for special situations users meet. The PTW30013 chambers and the electron beam quality of $R_{50}=2.25\;g/cm^2$ were selected for this study. 10 PTW30013 chambers, a cylindrical type of chamber, were calibrated in KFDA, the secondary standards dosimetry laboratories, and given the absorbed dose-to-water calibration factors, respectively. A "temporary" $k_{Q,Q_0}$ for each chamber were calculated using the absorbed dose determined by a cross-calibrated planeparallel chamber, with the result of an average 0.9352 for 10 chambers. This value for PTW30013 chamber was used to determine an absorbed dose to water at the reference depth. The absorbed doses determined by PTW30013 chambers were in an agreement within 2% with that by ROOS chamber. In a certain situation where a cylindrical chamber be used instead of a planeparellel chamber, the value of 0.9352 might be useful to determine an absorbed dose to water in the same beam quality of electron beam as this study.

• Korean Journal of Poultry Science
• /
• v.36 no.2
• /
• pp.177-186
• /
• 2009

It is well-known that unregulated over-expression of foreign gene may have unwanted physiological or toxic effects in transgenic animals. To circumvent these problems, we constructed retrovirus vector designed to express the foreign gene under the control of the tetracycline-inducible promoter. However, gene expressions in the tetracycline-inducible expression system (Tet system) are not completely regulated but a little leaky due to the inherent defects in conventional Tet-based systems. A more tightly controllable regulatory system can be achieved when the advanced versions ($rtTA2^SM2$) of rtTA and a minimal promoter in responsive components (pTRE-tight) are used in combination therein. In this study, we tried to produce human thrombopoietin (hTPO) from various target cells and transgenic chickens using the retrovirus vector combined with Tet system. hTPO is the primary regulator of platelet production and has an important role in the survival and expansion of hematopoietic stem cells. In a preliminary experiment in vitro, higher hTPO expression and tighter expression control were observed in chicken embryonic fibroblast (CEF) cells. We also measured the biological activity of the hTPO using Mo7e cells whose proliferation is dependant on hTPO. The biological activity of the recombinant hTPO from CEF was higher than both its commercial counterpart and hTPO from other target cells. The recombinant retrovirus was injected beneath the blastoderm of non-incubated chicken embryos (stage X). Out of 138 injected eggs, 15 chicks hatched after 21 days of incubation. Among them, 8 hatched chicks were hTPO positive. When the Go transgenic chicken was fed doxycycline (0.5 mg per 1 gram of feed), a tetracycline derivative, hTPO concentration of the transgenic chicken blood was 200 ng/mL. Germline transmission of the transgene was confirmed in sperm of the Go transgenic roosters. These results are informative to establish transgenic chickens as bioreactors for the mass production of commercially valuable and biological active human cytokine proteins.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
• /
• v.18 no.1
• /
• pp.1-21
• /
• 2012

In recent years, mobile phone has experienced an extremely fast evolution. It is equipped with high-quality color displays, high resolution cameras, and real-time accelerated 3D graphics. In addition, some other features are includes GPS sensor and Digital Compass, etc. This evolution advent significantly helps the application developers to use the power of smart-phones, to create a rich environment that offers a wide range of services and exciting possibilities. To date mobile AR in outdoor research there are many popular location-based AR services, such Layar and Wikitude. These systems have big limitation the AR contents hardly overlaid on the real target. Another research is context-based AR services using image recognition and tracking. The AR contents are precisely overlaid on the real target. But the real-time performance is restricted by the retrieval time and hardly implement in large scale area. In our work, we exploit to combine advantages of location-based AR with context-based AR. The system can easily find out surrounding landmarks first and then do the recognition and tracking with them. The proposed system mainly consists of two major parts-landmark browsing module and annotation module. In landmark browsing module, user can view an augmented virtual information (information media), such as text, picture and video on their smart-phone viewfinder, when they pointing out their smart-phone to a certain building or landmark. For this, landmark recognition technique is applied in this work. SURF point-based features are used in the matching process due to their robustness. To ensure the image retrieval and matching processes is fast enough for real time tracking, we exploit the contextual device (GPS and digital compass) information. This is necessary to select the nearest and pointed orientation landmarks from the database. The queried image is only matched with this selected data. Therefore, the speed for matching will be significantly increased. Secondly is the annotation module. Instead of viewing only the augmented information media, user can create virtual annotation based on linked data. Having to know a full knowledge about the landmark, are not necessary required. They can simply look for the appropriate topic by searching it with a keyword in linked data. With this, it helps the system to find out target URI in order to generate correct AR contents. On the other hand, in order to recognize target landmarks, images of selected building or landmark are captured from different angle and distance. This procedure looks like a similar processing of building a connection between the real building and the virtual information existed in the Linked Open Data. In our experiments, search range in the database is reduced by clustering images into groups according to their coordinates. A Grid-base clustering method and user location information are used to restrict the retrieval range. Comparing the existed research using cluster and GPS information the retrieval time is around 70~80ms. Experiment results show our approach the retrieval time reduces to around 18~20ms in average. Therefore the totally processing time is reduced from 490~540ms to 438~480ms. The performance improvement will be more obvious when the database growing. It demonstrates the proposed system is efficient and robust in many cases.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
• /
• v.18 no.3
• /
• pp.185-202
• /
• 2012

.Since the value of information has been realized in the information society, the usage and collection of information has become important. A facial expression that contains thousands of information as an artistic painting can be described in thousands of words. Followed by the idea, there has recently been a number of attempts to provide customers and companies with an intelligent service, which enables the perception of human emotions through one's facial expressions. For example, MIT Media Lab, the leading organization in this research area, has developed the human emotion prediction model, and has applied their studies to the commercial business. In the academic area, a number of the conventional methods such as Multiple Regression Analysis (MRA) or Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) have been applied to predict human emotion in prior studies. However, MRA is generally criticized because of its low prediction accuracy. This is inevitable since MRA can only explain the linear relationship between the dependent variables and the independent variable. To mitigate the limitations of MRA, some studies like Jung and Kim (2012) have used ANN as the alternative, and they reported that ANN generated more accurate prediction than the statistical methods like MRA. However, it has also been criticized due to over fitting and the difficulty of the network design (e.g. setting the number of the layers and the number of the nodes in the hidden layers). Under this background, we propose a novel model using Support Vector Regression (SVR) in order to increase the prediction accuracy. SVR is an extensive version of Support Vector Machine (SVM) designated to solve the regression problems. The model produced by SVR only depends on a subset of the training data, because the cost function for building the model ignores any training data that is close (within a threshold ${\varepsilon}$) to the model prediction. Using SVR, we tried to build a model that can measure the level of arousal and valence from the facial features. To validate the usefulness of the proposed model, we collected the data of facial reactions when providing appropriate visual stimulating contents, and extracted the features from the data. Next, the steps of the preprocessing were taken to choose statistically significant variables. In total, 297 cases were used for the experiment. As the comparative models, we also applied MRA and ANN to the same data set. For SVR, we adopted '${\varepsilon}$-insensitive loss function', and 'grid search' technique to find the optimal values of the parameters like C, d, ${\sigma}^2$, and ${\varepsilon}$. In the case of ANN, we adopted a standard three-layer backpropagation network, which has a single hidden layer. The learning rate and momentum rate of ANN were set to 10%, and we used sigmoid function as the transfer function of hidden and output nodes. We performed the experiments repeatedly by varying the number of nodes in the hidden layer to n/2, n, 3n/2, and 2n, where n is the number of the input variables. The stopping condition for ANN was set to 50,000 learning events. And, we used MAE (Mean Absolute Error) as the measure for performance comparison. From the experiment, we found that SVR achieved the highest prediction accuracy for the hold-out data set compared to MRA and ANN. Regardless of the target variables (the level of arousal, or the level of positive / negative valence), SVR showed the best performance for the hold-out data set. ANN also outperformed MRA, however, it showed the considerably lower prediction accuracy than SVR for both target variables. The findings of our research are expected to be useful to the researchers or practitioners who are willing to build the models for recognizing human emotions.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
• /
• v.22 no.3
• /
• pp.75-97
• /
• 2012

Knowledge residing in the heads of employees has always been regarded as one of the most critical resources within a firm. However, many tries to facilitate knowledge transfer among employees has been unsuccessful because of the motivational and cognitive problems between the knowledge source and the recipient. Social capital, which is defined as "the sum of the actual and potential resources embedded within, available through, derived from the network of relationships possessed by an individual or social unit [Nahapiet and Ghoshal, 1998]," is suggested to resolve these motivational and cognitive problems of knowledge transfer. In Social capital theory, there are two research streams. One insists that social capital strengthens group solidarity and brings up cooperative behaviors among group members, such as voluntary help to colleagues. Therefore, social capital can motivate an expert to transfer his/her knowledge to a colleague in need without any direct reward. The other stream insists that social capital provides an access to various resources that the owner of social capital doesn't possess directly. In knowledge transfer context, an employee with social capital can access and learn much knowledge from his/her colleagues. Therefore, social capital provides benefits to both the knowledge source and the recipient in different ways. However, prior research on knowledge transfer and social capital is mostly limited to either of the research stream of social capital and covered only the knowledge source's or the knowledge recipient's perspective. Social network theory which focuses on the structural dimension of social capital provides clear explanation about the in-depth mechanisms of social capital's two different benefits. 'Strong tie' builds up identification, trust, and emotional attachment between the knowledge source and the recipient; therefore, it motivates the knowledge source to transfer his/her knowledge to the recipient. On the other hand, 'weak tie' easily expands to 'diverse' knowledge sources because it does not take much effort to manage. Therefore, the real value of 'weak tie' comes from the 'diverse network structure,' not the 'weak tie' itself. It implies that the two different perspectives on strength of ties can co-exist. For example, an extroverted employee can manage many 'strong' ties with 'various' colleagues. In this regards, the individual-level structure of one's relationships as well as the dyadic-level relationship should be considered together to provide a holistic view of social capital. In addition, interaction effect between individual-level characteristics and dyadic-level characteristics can be examined, too. Based on these arguments, this study has following research questions. (1) How does the social capital of the knowledge source and the recipient influence knowledge transfer respectively? (2) How does the strength of ties between the knowledge source and the recipient influence knowledge transfer? (3) How does the social capital of the knowledge source and the recipient influence the effect of the strength of ties between the knowledge source and the recipient on knowledge transfer? Based on Social capital theory and Social network theory, a multi-level research model is developed to consider both the individual-level social capital of the knowledge source and the recipient and the dyadic-level strength of relationship between the knowledge source and the recipient. 'Cross-classified random effect model,' one of the multi-level analysis methods, is adopted to analyze the survey responses from 337 R&D employees. The results of analysis provide several findings. First, among three dimensions of the knowledge source's social capital, network centrality (i.e., structural dimension) shows the significant direct effect on knowledge transfer. On the other hand, the knowledge recipient's network centrality is not influential. Instead, it strengthens the influence of the strength of ties between the knowledge source and the recipient on knowledge transfer. It means that the knowledge source's network centrality does not directly increase knowledge transfer. Instead, by providing access to various knowledge sources, the network centrality provides only the context where the strong tie between the knowledge source and the recipient leads to effective knowledge transfer. In short, network centrality has indirect effect on knowledge transfer from the knowledge recipient's perspective, while it has direct effect from the knowledge source's perspective. This is the most important contribution of this research. In addition, contrary to the research hypothesis, company tenure of the knowledge recipient negatively influences knowledge transfer. It means that experienced employees do not look for new knowledge and stick to their own knowledge. This is also an interesting result. One of the possible reasons is the hierarchical culture of Korea, such as a fear of losing face in front of subordinates. In a research methodology perspective, multi-level analysis adopted in this study seems to be very promising in management research area which has a multi-level data structure, such as employee-team-department-company. In addition, social network analysis is also a promising research approach with an exploding availability of online social network data.

• Journal of Life Science
• /
• v.18 no.11
• /
• pp.1532-1537
• /
• 2008

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of different arthroplasty designs on knee kinematic and lower limb muscular activation for up-stair and down-stair movement. 3-D video analysis of whole body and joint kinematics and EMG analysis of quadriceps and hamstrings were conducted. One-way ANOVAs were used for statistical analyses (p=0.05). The single-radius group exhibited more arthroplasty limb quadriceps EMG and hamstring coactivation EMG than the multi-radius group. Single-radius demonstrated more abduction angular displacement and reached peak abduction earlier than the multi-radius arthroplasty limb. The single- radius the percent body fat showed similar values in the Elderly, Single and Multi-radius group among the periods, however Control group was Lowered among the periods. Single-radius group limb also increased the quadriceps muscle activation level to produce more knee extension moment to compensate for the short quadriceps moment arm. Resting metabolic rate was significantly increased in control group in the period of LI. Energy expenditure was extremely increased in all groups except control group among the periods. We can say this is the exercise effects.