• Journal of Microbiology and Biotechnology
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• v.23 no.10
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• pp.1403-1412
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• 2013

Ethanol fuel production from lignocellulosic biomass is emerging as one of the most important technologies for sustainable development. To use this biomass, it is necessary to circumvent the physical and chemical barriers presented by the cohesive combination of the main biomass components, which hinders the hydrolysis of cellulose and hemicellulose into fermentable sugars. This study evaluated the hydrolytic capacity of enzymes produced by yeasts, isolated from the soils of the Brazilian Cerrado biome (savannah) and the Amazon region, on sugarcane bagasse pre-treated with $H_2SO_4$. Among the 103 and 214 yeast isolates from the Minas Gerais Cerrado and the Amazon regions, 18 (17.47%) and 11 (5.14%) isolates, respectively, were cellulase-producing. Cryptococcus laurentii was prevalent and produced significant ${\beta}$-glucosidase levels, which were higher than the endo- and exoglucanase activities. In natura sugarcane bagasse was pre-treated with 2% $H_2SO_4$ for 30 min at $150^{\circ}C$. Subsequently, the obtained fibrous residue was subjected to hydrolysis using the Cryptococcus laurentii yeast enzyme extract for 72 h. This enzyme extract promoted the conversion of approximately 32% of the cellulose, of which 2.4% was glucose, after the enzymatic hydrolysis reaction, suggesting that C. laurentii is a good ${\beta}$-glucosidase producer. The results presented in this study highlight the importance of isolating microbial strains that produce enzymes of biotechnological interest, given their extensive application in biofuel production.

• Advances in environmental research
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• v.4 no.4
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• pp.247-262
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• 2015

The few lignin biomarker studies conducted in tropical environments are hampered by having to use references signatures established for plants and soils characteristic of the temperate zone. This study presents a lignin biomarker analysis (vanillyls (V), p-hydroxyls (P), syringyls (S), cinnamyls (C)) of the dominant plant species and soil horizons as well as an analysis of the interrelated terrigenous organic matter (TOM) dynamics between vegetation and soil of the $Tapaj{\acute{o}}s$ river region, an active colonization front in the Brazilian Amazon. We collected and analyzed samples from 17 fresh dominant plant species and 48 soil cores at three depths (0-5 cm, 20-25 cm, 50-55 cm) from primary rainforest, fallow forest, subsistence agriculture fields and pastures. Lignin signatures in tropical plants clearly distinguish from temperate ones with high ratios of Acid/aldehyde of vanillyls ((Ad/Al)v) and P/V+S. Contrary to temperate environments, similarly high ratios in tropical soils are not related to TOM degradation along with pedogenesis but to direct influence of plants growing on them. Lignin signatures of both plants and soils of primary rainforest and fallow forest clearly distinguish from those of non-forested areas, i.e., agriculture fields and pastures. Attalea speciosa Palm trees, an invasive species in all perturbed landscapes of the Amazon, exhibit lignin signatures clearly distinct from other dominant plant species. The study of lignin signatures in tropical areas thus represents a powerful tool to evaluate the impact of primary rainforest clearing on TOM dynamics in tropical areas.

• Journal of Veterinary Science
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.18.1-18.10
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• 2022

Background: Canine herpesvirus type 1 (CaHV-1) infects dogs and is associated with neonatal deaths and reproductive, ocular, neurological, and respiratory problems. In Brazil, reports of CaHV-1 have been restricted to the southeast and south regions, particularly in municipalities in the state of Rio Grande do Sul. Objectives: To assess the presence and variability of CaHV-1 in canine populations in the state of Pará, North Brazil. Methods: Biological samples from 159 dogs from 4 municipalities in the State of Pará were evaluated using polymerase chain reaction and phylogenetic analyses, with the target being the viral enzyme, thymidine kinase. Results: CaHV-1 was detected in 13 dogs (8.2%), with 2 animals being from the municipality of Santa Bárbara do Pará, 8 from Algodoal Island, 2 from Salinópolis, and one from Capanema. The study sequences revealed 100% identity among themselves and 64% to 100% identity with the other nucleotide sequences from Australia, Brazil, United Kingdom, and United States, including 100% identity with the 2002 isolate from Australia. The 1996 isolate from France was grouped in a branch that was different from the sequence of this study. Conclusions: This study presents the first molecular detection of CaHV-1 in dogs from the Amazon region in northern Brazil. The nucleotide identity between the strains and cytosine insertion in the sequences isolated in this study suggests at least 2 strains of CaHV-1 circulating in Brazil (Pará and BTU-1).

• International Journal of Concrete Structures and Materials
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.61-67
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• 2015

The concept of horizontal shear connection utilization on wood-concrete beams intends to be an alternative connection detail for composite wood-concrete decks. The volume of sawn-wood is over three times more expensive than concrete, in Brazil. In order to be competitive in the Brazilian market we need a composite deck with the least amount of wood and a simple and inexpensive connection detail. This research project uses medium to high density tropical hardwoods managed from the Brazilian Amazon region and construction steel rods. The beams studied are composed of a bottom layer of staggered wood boards and a top layer of concrete. The wood members are laterally nailed together to form a wide beam, and horizontal rebar connectors are installed before the concrete layer is applied on top. Two sets of wood-concrete layered beams with horizontal rebar connectors (6 and 8) were tested in third-point loading flexural bending. The initial results reveal medium composite efficiency for the beams tested. An improvement on the previously conceived connection detail (set with six connectors) for the composite wood-concrete structural floor system was achieved by the set with eight connectors. The new layout of the horizontal rebar connectors added higher composite efficiency for the beams tested. Further analysis with advanced rigorous numerical Finite Element Modeling is suggested to optimize the connection parameters. Composite wood-concrete decks can attend a large demand for pedestrian bridges, as well as residential and commercial slabs in the Brazilian Amazon.

• Journal of Environmental Science International
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• v.10 no.5
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• pp.337-342
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• 2001

The Rondonia Boundary Layer Experiment (RBLE-II) was conceived to collect data the atmospheric boundary layer over two representative surface in the Amazon region of Brazil; tropical forest and a deforested, pasture area. The present study deals with the observations of atmospheric boundary layer growth and decay. Although the atmospheric boundary layer measurements made in RBLE-II were not made simultaneously over the two different surface types, some insights can be gained from analysing and comparing with their structure. The greater depth of the nocturnal boundary layer at the forest site may be due to influence of mechanical turbulence. The pasture site is aerodynamically smoother and so the downward turbulent diffusion will be much pasture than over the forest. The development of the convective boundary layer is stronger over the pasture than over the forest. The influence of the sensible heat flux is important but may be not enough to explain the difference completely. It seems that energy advection may occur from the wet and colder(forest) to the dry and warmer area(pasture), rapidly breaking up the nocturnal inversion. Such advection can explain the abrupt growth of the convective boundary layer at the pasture site during the early morning.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.26 no.2
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• pp.1-25
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• 2020

In this paper, we suggest an application system architecture which provides accurate, fast and efficient automatic gasometer reading function. The system captures gasometer image using mobile device camera, transmits the image to a cloud server on top of private LTE network, and analyzes the image to extract character information of device ID and gas usage amount by selective optical character recognition based on deep learning technology. In general, there are many types of character in an image and optical character recognition technology extracts all character information in an image. But some applications need to ignore non-of-interest types of character and only have to focus on some specific types of characters. For an example of the application, automatic gasometer reading system only need to extract device ID and gas usage amount character information from gasometer images to send bill to users. Non-of-interest character strings, such as device type, manufacturer, manufacturing date, specification and etc., are not valuable information to the application. Thus, the application have to analyze point of interest region and specific types of characters to extract valuable information only. We adopted CNN (Convolutional Neural Network) based object detection and CRNN (Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network) technology for selective optical character recognition which only analyze point of interest region for selective character information extraction. We build up 3 neural networks for the application system. The first is a convolutional neural network which detects point of interest region of gas usage amount and device ID information character strings, the second is another convolutional neural network which transforms spatial information of point of interest region to spatial sequential feature vectors, and the third is bi-directional long short term memory network which converts spatial sequential information to character strings using time-series analysis mapping from feature vectors to character strings. In this research, point of interest character strings are device ID and gas usage amount. Device ID consists of 12 arabic character strings and gas usage amount consists of 4 ~ 5 arabic character strings. All system components are implemented in Amazon Web Service Cloud with Intel Zeon E5-2686 v4 CPU and NVidia TESLA V100 GPU. The system architecture adopts master-lave processing structure for efficient and fast parallel processing coping with about 700,000 requests per day. Mobile device captures gasometer image and transmits to master process in AWS cloud. Master process runs on Intel Zeon CPU and pushes reading request from mobile device to an input queue with FIFO (First In First Out) structure. Slave process consists of 3 types of deep neural networks which conduct character recognition process and runs on NVidia GPU module. Slave process is always polling the input queue to get recognition request. If there are some requests from master process in the input queue, slave process converts the image in the input queue to device ID character string, gas usage amount character string and position information of the strings, returns the information to output queue, and switch to idle mode to poll the input queue. Master process gets final information form the output queue and delivers the information to the mobile device. We used total 27,120 gasometer images for training, validation and testing of 3 types of deep neural network. 22,985 images were used for training and validation, 4,135 images were used for testing. We randomly splitted 22,985 images with 8:2 ratio for training and validation respectively for each training epoch. 4,135 test image were categorized into 5 types (Normal, noise, reflex, scale and slant). Normal data is clean image data, noise means image with noise signal, relfex means image with light reflection in gasometer region, scale means images with small object size due to long-distance capturing and slant means images which is not horizontally flat. Final character string recognition accuracies for device ID and gas usage amount of normal data are 0.960 and 0.864 respectively.

• Atmosphere
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.425-441
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• 2013

This study investigates the projections of water cycle, budget and river discharge over land in the world at the end of twenty-first century simulated by atmosphere-ocean climate model of Hadley Centre (HadGEM2-AO) and total runoff integrating pathways (TRIP) based on the RCP scenario. Firstly, to validate the HadGEM2-AO hydrology, the surface water states were evaluated for the present period using precipitation, evaporation, runoff and river discharge. Although this model underestimates the annual precipitation about 0.4 mm $mon^{-1}$, evaporation 3.7 mm $mon^{-1}$, total runoff 1.6 mm $mon^{-1}$ and river discharge 8.6% than observation and reanalysis data, it has good water balance in terms of inflow and outflow at surface. In other words, it indicates the -0.3 mm $mon^{-1}$ of water storage (P-E-R) compared with ERA40 showing -2.4 mm $mon^{-1}$ for the present hydrological climate. At the end of the twenty-first century, annual mean precipitation may decrease in heavy rainfall region, such as northern part of South America, central Africa and eastern of North America, but for increase over the Tropical Western Pacific and East Asian region. Also it can generally increase in high latitudes inland of the Northern Hemisphere. Spatial patterns of annual evaporation and runoff are similar to that of precipitation. And river discharge tends to increase over all continents except for South America including Amazon Basin, due to increased runoff. Overall, HadGEM2-AO prospects that water budget for the future will globally have negative signal (-8.0~-0.3% of change rate) in all RCP scenarios indicating drier phase than the present climate over land.

• Journal of Life Science
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.441-449
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• 2015

Endlicheria anomala, a neotropical plant, is found in northern South America and the Amazon region. It is traditionally used to remove poisons and cure gangrene. According to recent data, this plant has diverse biological properties such as anti-oxidative, anti-inflammatory and anti-melanogenic properties. However, the anti-cancer effect of E. anomala and its molecular mechanisms remain unclear. In this study, we examined the anti-cancer effect and the active mechanism of methanol extract of E. anomala (MEEA) in human lung adenocarcinoma cells (A549) and human liver cancer cells (HepG2). Our data revealed that MEEA showed cytotoxic activity in a dose-dependent manner and induced apoptosis both in A549 and HepG2 cells. We verified evidences of apoptosis via formation of chromatin condensation, apoptotic body and accumulation of cells in the subG1 phase. Following observed apoptosis-related phenomena, we found that the induction of apoptosis by MEEA was associated with the increase of tumor suppressor p53 and cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitor p21 (WAF1/CIP1) expression. Furthermore, MEEA-induced apoptosis was characterized with proteolytic activation of caspase-3, degradation of poly ADP ribose polymerase (PARP), and up-regulation of pro-apoptotic Bax expression. Taken together, these findings indicate that MEEA may have potential cancer therapeutic utility in A549 and HepG2 cells.

• The Sea:JOURNAL OF THE KOREAN SOCIETY OF OCEANOGRAPHY
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.49-57
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• 2016

Even if an external forcing that will drive a climate change is given uniformly over the globe, the corresponding climate change and the feedbacks by the climate system differ by region. Thus the detection of global warming signal has been made on a regional scale as well as on a global average against the internal variabilities and other noises involved in the climate change. The purpose of this study is to estimate a timing of unprecedented climate due to global warming and to analyze the regional differences in the estimated results. For this purpose, unlike previous studies that used climate simulation data, we used an observational dataset to estimate a magnitude of internal variability and a future temperature change. We calculated a linear trend in surface temperature using a historical temperature record from 1880 to 2014 and a magnitude of internal variability as the largest temperature displacement from the linear trend. A timing of unprecedented climate was defined as the first year when a predicted minimum temperature exceeds the maximum temperature record in a historical data and remains as such since then. Presumed that the linear trend and the maximum displacement will be maintained in the future, an unprecedented climate over the land would come within 200 years from now in the western area of Africa, the low latitudes including India and the southern part of Arabian Peninsula in Eurasia, the high latitudes including Greenland and the mid-western part of Canada in North America, the low latitudes including Amazon in South America, the areas surrounding the Ross Sea in Antarctica, and parts of East Asia including Korean Peninsula. On the other hand, an unprecedented climate would come later after 400 years in the high latitudes of Eurasia including the northern Europe, the middle and southern parts of North America including the U.S.A. and Mexico. For the ocean, an unprecedented climate would come within 200 years over the Indian Ocean, the middle latitudes of the North Atlantic and the South Atlantic, parts of the Southern Ocean, the Antarctic Ross Sea, and parts of the Arctic Sea. In the meantime, an unprecedented climate would come even after thousands of years over some other regions of ocean including the eastern tropical Pacific and the North Pacific middle latitudes where an internal variability is large. In summary, spatial pattern in timing of unprecedented climate are different for each continent. For the ocean, it is highly affected by large internal variability except for the high-latitude regions with a significant warming trend. As such, a timing of an unprecedented climate would not be uniform over the globe but considerably different by region. Our results suggest that it is necessary to consider an internal variability as well as a regional warming rate when planning a climate change mitigation and adaption policy.

• Journal of International Area Studies (JIAS)
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.109-134
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• 2011

Drug-related crime has increased in spite of visible results of Uribe government's hard-line policies on drug eradication and illegally armed organizations which were pursued under U.S. support, without the accompaniment of quantity change in drug cultivation and trade. Military disputes of left-right illegally armed communities surrounding illegal crop cultivation rights were rather intensified, and the number of refugees was increased through enforced displaced people. The 2005 refugee registration committee RUPD reports that 3,316,862 people, 7.3% of total population, were refugees. In particular, the number of refugees presented a large increase rate of 624% when compared to the past year due to enforced displaced people. Main discharge areas of enforced displaced people are connected with drug crime and activities of illegally armed organizations, and are places of increased armed disputes in the process of occupied territory expansion of illegally armed communities and militia. Undiscriminated attacks were executed on farmers in the process of occupation of illegal crop cultivation sites by illegally armed organization and militia to emit enforced displaced people, who moved to border areas by crossing national borders. Enforced displaced people were restricted to certain areas before the appearance of Uribe administration. However, enforced displaced people not only presented quantitative expansion, but also showed tendency of nationwide expansion after national security policy was pursued. With the closing of the Amazon area, previously the main route of drug trade, activity base of illegally armed organizations was moved to the Pacific region, and Panama border area experienced refugee increase due to the new policy of enforced displaced people. This study aims to understand the actual condition and cause for the increase in refugees in Colombia based on border areas of Venezuela, which is the nation of highest dispersion of Columbian refugees, Panama, which has appeared as a new destination for refugees after the 90s, and Ecuador, which has experienced sudden refugee increase in 2000.