• Journal of Microbiology and Biotechnology
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• v.28 no.6
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• pp.883-892
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• 2018

Probiotics, including Enterococcus faecium, confer a health benefit on the host. An Enterococcus strain was isolated from healthy chicken cecum, identified as E. faecium by 16S rDNA gene sequence analysis, and designated as E. faecium L11. To evaluate the potential of E. faecium L11 as a probiotic, the gastrointestinal tolerance, immunomodulatory activity, and lifespan extension properties of the strain were assayed. E. faecium L11 showed >66% and >62% survival in artificial gastric juice (0.3% pepsin, pH 2.5) and simulated small intestinal juice (0.5% bile salt and 0.1% pancreatin), respectively. Heat-killed E. faecium L11 significantly (p < 0.05) increased immune cell proliferation compared with controls, and stimulated the production of cytokines (IL-6 and $TNF-{\alpha}$) by activated macrophages obtained from ICR mice. In addition, E. faecium L11 showed a protective effect against Salmonella Typhimurium infection in Caenorhabditis elegans. In addition, feeding E. faecium L11 significantly (p < 0.05) extended the lifespan of C. elegans compared with the control. Furthermore, genes related to aging and host defense were upregulated in E. faecium L11-fed worms. In conclusion, E. faecium L11, which prolongs the lifespan of C. elegans, may be a potent probiotic supplement for livestock.

• Journal of the Korean Association of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons
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• v.28 no.6
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• pp.434-439
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• 2002

Oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) is one of the most common head and neck cancers. OSCC generally has a poor prognosis due to its tendency towards a local invasion and subsequent metastasis, which is mediated by multiple proteolytic enzymes and angiogenesis. Soy products contain high levels of isoflavonoids, including the tyrosine kinase inhibitor, genistein, which has been identified as a potent inhibitor of cell proliferation and in vitro angiogenesis. The purpose of this in vitro study is to evaluate the anti-cancer effect of genistein with respect to the angiogenesis and basement membrane invasion in OSCC. The highly invasive OSCC cell line, HSC-3 cells were cultured in the presence of $10{\mu}M$ genistein for 24h. To evaluate the effects of genistein on the invasiveness and the gelatinolytic activity, in vitro invasion assay and zymography were performed. In order to evaluate the effect on the VEGF and bFGF mRNA expression, RT-PCR and northern hybridization reaction, and chemiluminescence detection were applied. The in vitro invasion assay showed that the genistein treatment reduced the cellular invasion through the artificial basement membrane and significant difference between the control group and the genistein treated group was shown in MMP-2 activity. Especially, the 62 kDa activated form of MMP-2 in the control group was 1.8 times higher than that in the genistein treated group. The results of the northern blot analyses indicated that VEGF mRNA expression in the genistein treated group was significantly down regulated. This study showed that genistein inhibits angiogenesis and reduces basement membrane invasion in OSCC. It seems to support the possibility of genistein as an anti-cancer agent.

• Mycobiology
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• v.35 no.2
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• pp.54-61
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• 2007

Two isolates of Tricholoma matsutake T-008 and T-034, preserved in Entomopathogenic Fungal Culture Collection (EFCC) of Korea, were used in the present study. The isolates had 100% Bootstrap homology with Tricholoma matsutake U62964 and T. matsutake AB188557 and AF309538 preserved in Gene Bank of NCBI. Mycelial growth of T. matsutake was highest in TMM and MYA at $25^{\circ}C$. The highest dry wt. of mycelium was obtained after 65 days of culture, when 6 mycelial discs were inoculated in 100 ml of broth in 250 ml shaking flask. Mycelial mats were observed in clumped condition at the inoculation sites of pine forest after two weeks of inoculation. After 5 months of inoculation, mycelia mats were observed growing inside soil and walls of a few inoculation sites, while mycelial mats growth up to $5{\sim}8$ cm were observed in the roots of pine tree after 6 months. The survival rate of the inoculum was about 40% of the total inoculation sites. The survival rate was found below 20% when the mycelium was inoculated in the summer. The reasons for low survival rates of the mycelium were mainly due to dry season and the soil-borne small animals such as earthworm and mole. After one year of inoculation, no external difference was observed between the artificially inoculated mycelia and the naturally existing mycelia of T. matsutake. The present study showed that fruiting bodies of T. matsutake could be produced by artificial inoculation under the appropriate environmental conditions.

• Journal of Microbiology
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• v.45 no.4
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• pp.291-296
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• 2007

Insoluble glucans synthesized by Streptococcus mutans enhance the pathogenicity of oral biofilm by promoting the adherence and accumulation of cariogenic bacteria on the surface of the tooth. The objective of this study was to investigate the effect of Leuconostoc spp. on the in vitro formation of S. mutans biofilm. Three strains, Leuconostoc gelidum A TCC 49366, Leuconostoc mesenteroides ssp. cremoris A TCC 19254 and Leuconostoc mesenteroides ssp. mesenteroides ATCC 8293, were used in this study. They exhibited profound inhibitory effects on the formation of S. mutans biofilm and on the proliferation of S. mutans. The water-soluble polymers produced from sucrose were most strongly produced by L. gelidum, followed by L. mesenteroides ssp. cremoris and L. mesenteroides ssp. mesenteroides. The mean wet weights of the artificial biofilm of S. mutans were also significantly reduced as a result of the addition of the water-soluble polymers obtained from Leuconostoc cultures. According to the results of thin-layer chromatographic analysis, the hydrolysates of the water-soluble polymers produced by Leuconostoc were identical to those of dextran T-2000, forming predominately ${\alpha}-(1-6)$ glucose linkages. These results indicate that dextran-producing Leuconostoc strains are able to inhibit the formation of S. mutans biofilm in vitro.

• KIPS Transactions on Software and Data Engineering
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• v.7 no.11
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• pp.411-418
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• 2018

With the proliferation of artificial intelligence technology, it is becoming important to obtain, store, and utilize scientific data in research and science sectors. A number of methods for extracting meaningful objects such as graphs and tables from research articles have been proposed to eventually obtain scientific data. Existing extraction methods using heuristic approaches are hardly applicable to electronic documents having heterogeneous manuscript formats because they are designed to work properly for some targeted manuscripts. This paper proposes a prototype of an object extraction system which exploits a recent deep-learning technology so as to overcome the inflexibility of the heuristic approaches. We implemented our trained model, based on the Faster R-CNN algorithm, using the Google TensorFlow Object Detection API and also composed an annotated data set from 100 research articles for training and evaluation. Finally, a performance evaluation shows that the proposed system outperforms a comparator adopting heuristic approaches by 5.2%.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.57-64
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• 2020

Recently, due to the proliferation of IoT sensors, the development of big data and artificial intelligence, time series prediction research on fine dust pollution is actively conducted. However, because the data representing fine dust contamination changes rapidly, traditional time series prediction methods do not provide a level of accuracy that can be used in the field. In this paper, we propose a method that reflects the classification results of environmental conditions through CNN when predicting micro dust contamination using LSTM. Although LSTM and CNN are independent, they are integrated into one network through the interface, so this method is easier to understand than the application LSTM. In the verification experiments of the proposed method using Beijing PM2.5 data, the prediction accuracy and predictive power for the timing of change were consistently improved in various experimental cases.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
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• 2021.10a
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• pp.474-477
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• 2021

Recently, in order to prevent the proliferation of COVID-19, which began in earnest in 2020, an increasing number of places have been measuring the temperature and required to wear a mask. However, as wearing a mask and checking the temperature are typically measured directly by a person or by a single individual positioned in front of the machine, standards may vary based on the person's manual measurement method, wasting workforce. While standing in front of a device often measures the maximum temperature of the face, the standard of fever is also unclear. Both approaches can create bottleneck situations when checking large numbers of people. Furthermore, it is unable to conduct periodic measurements and tracking because the measuring machines are generally put only at the entrance. Thus, this study suggests a method for preventing the spread of infectious diseases by automatically identifying and displaying unmasked people and those with fever in real-time using a general camera, a thermal imaging camera, and an artificial intelligence algorithm.

• IMMUNE NETWORK
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.140-145
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• 2016

Ophiocordyceps sinensis is a natural fungus that has been valued as a health food and used in traditional Chinese medicine for centuries. The fungus is parasitic and colonizes insect larva. Naturally occurring O. sinensis thrives at high altitude in cold and grassy alpine meadows on the Himalayan mountain ranges. Wild Ophiocordyceps is becoming increasingly rare in its natural habitat, and its price limits its use in clinical practice. Therefore, the development of a standardized alternative is a great focus of research to allow the use of Ophiocordyceps as a medicine. To develop an alternative for wild Ophiocordyceps, a refined standardized extract, CBG-CS-2, was produced by artificial fermentation and extraction of the mycelial strain Paecilomyces hepiali CBG-CS-1, which originated from wild O. sinensis. In this study, we analyzed the in vitro immune-modulating effect of CBG-CS-2 on natural killer cells and B and T lymphocytes. CBG-CS-2 stimulated splenocyte proliferation and enhanced Th1-type cytokine expression in the mouse splenocytes. Importantly, in vitro CBG-CS-2 treatment enhanced the killing activity of the NK-92MI natural killer cell line. These results indicate that the mycelial culture extract prepared from Ophiocordyceps exhibits immune-modulating activity, as was observed in vivo and this suggests its possible use in the treatment of diseases caused by abnormal immune function.

• Korean Journal of Clinical Laboratory Science
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• v.48 no.3
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• pp.169-175
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• 2016

Saccharin (o-benzoic sulfimide) is the first artificial and non-caloric sweetener that was first synthesized in 1879. In this study, we examined the biological activity of saccharin against various human cancer cell lines and human bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells. A viability assay based on the conversion of 3-(4,5-dimethylthiazol-2-yl)-2,5-diphenyltetrazolium bromide (MTT) was performed to test for the cytotoxicity of saccharin about the four human cancer cell lines (H460, H157, A549 and SKOV3), one murine cancer cellline (Raw264.7), and MSCs. In order to find the differentially expressed gene in saccharin-treated MSCs against untreated MSCs, we performed annealing control primer (ACP)-based differential display reverse transcriptionp-olymerase chain reaction (DDRT-PCR). All tested cells were treated with saccharin at various concentrations (0.0, 4.8, 7.2, 9.6, 12.0, 14.4 mg/mL) for 48 hr. The number of metabolically active cancer cells decreased when treated with the saccharin at various concentrations for 48 hr as compared with the untreated cells. The decrease in cell survival was more evident with increasing concentrations of saccharin. Moreover, novel candidate genes, which were differentially expressed in MSCs in response to saccharin, were identified in 16 bands on 2% agarose gel. This revealed 16-7 up-regulated and 9 down-regulated-differentially expressed genes indicated by arrows. One of these candidate genes was a FK506-binding protein gene. The functional roles of FK506 binding proteins, with respect to the activities of stem cell proliferation, were not characterized. Further studies are required to get a better understanding of FK506-binding proteins in its roles in increasing stem cell proliferative activities from using saccharin.

• Journal of the Society of Cosmetic Scientists of Korea
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• v.41 no.4
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• pp.325-331
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• 2015

Skin is exposed to sunlight or artificial indoor light on a daily. The reached solar light on the earth surface consist of 50% visible light and 45% infrared (IR) except for ultra violet (UV). The negative effects of UV including UVB and UVA have been steadily investigated within the last decades. However, little is known about the effects of visible or IR light. In this study, we irradiated human dermal fibroblasts using light emitting diode (LED) to investigate the optimal parameter for enhancing cell growth and collagen synthesis. We found that red of 630 nm and green of 520 nm enhance the cell proliferation, but irradiation with purple and blue light exerts toxic effects. To examine the response of irradiation time and light intensity on the fibroblasts, cells were exposed to red or green light with intensities from 0.05 to $0.75mW/cm^2$. Procollagen secretion was increased of 1.4 fold by 10 min irradiation, while 30 min treatment decreased the collagen synthesis of dermal fibroblasts. Treatment with red of $0.3mW/cm^2$ and green of 0.15 and $0.3mW/cm^2$ resulted in enhancement of collagen mRNA. Lastly, we investigated the combinatorial effect of red and green light on dermal fibroblasts. The sequential irradiation of red and green light is an efficient way for the purpose of the increase in the number of fibroblasts than single light treatment. On the other hand, the exposure of red light alone was more effective method for enhancing of collagen secretion. Our study showed that specific light parameters accelerated cell proliferation, gene expression and collagen secretion on human dermal fibroblasts. In conclusion, we demonstrate that light exposure with specific parameter has beneficial effects on the function of dermal fibroblasts, and suggests the possibility of its cosmetically and clinical application.