• Title/Summary/Keyword: Biological Engineering

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Integrated Wet Oxidation and Aerobic Biological Treatment of the Wastewater Containing High Concentration of Phenol (고농도 페놀 폐수의 습식산화와 호기성 생물학적 통합처리)

  • Choi, Ho-Jun;Lee, Seung-Ho;Yu, Yong-Ho;Yoon, Wang-Lai;Suh, II-Soon
    • KSBB Journal
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    • v.22 no.4
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    • pp.244-248
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    • 2007
  • The treatment of a model wastewater containing high concentration, 10 $g/{\ell}$, of phenol in an integrated wet oxidation-aerobic biological treatment was investigated. Partial wet oxidation under mild operating conditions was capable of converting the original phenol to biodegradable organic acids such as maleic acid, formic acid and acetic acid, the solution of which was subjected to the subsequent aerobic biological treatment. The wet oxidation was carried out at 150$^{\circ}C$ and 200$^{\circ}C$ and the initial pH of 1 to 12. The high temperature of 200$^{\circ}C$ and the acidic initial condition in the wet oxidation led to effluents of which biodegradability was higher in the subsequent biological oxidation process, as assessed by chemical oxygen demand (COD) removal. Homogeneous catalyst of $CuSO_4$ was also used for increasing the oxidation rate in the wet oxidation at 150$^{\circ}C$ and initial pH of 3.0. However, the pretreatment with the catalytic wet oxidation resulted in effluents which were less biodegradable in the aerobic biological process compared to those out of the non-catalytic wet oxidation at the same operating conditions.

Novel measuring technique for biological adhesion forces using AFM (원자현미경을 이용한 생체물질의 접착력 측정기술 개발)

  • Kim S.J.;Moon W.K.;Jun J.H.
    • Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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    • 2005.06a
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    • pp.641-644
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    • 2005
  • The study on the interaction forces of some biological materials is important to understanding biological phenomena and their application to practical purpose. This paper introduces a measuring technique for biological adhesive forces using the AFM(Atomic Force Microscope). Since no standardized thesis on adhesive forces exist, the adhesive forces is defined as adhesive forces against a hardened surface of biological materials. To grant the results are meaningful, which is based on the understanding the surface characteristics of biological materials using the AFM, a nominal value of average adhesive force per unit area should be measured. Therefore the modified AFM probe with small micro glass bead was proposed so that it can guarantee the required contact area for measuring the average adhesive forces. A pyrex glass substrate with circular patterns, which was fabricated by micromachining technique, is introduced in order to controll the contact area. The two types of mussel adhesive proteins, Celltak and recombinant-MGFP5, were tested by the proposed measuring method. The test results show that the adhesive force of the mussel adhesive proteins can be reliably measured by use of this method.

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Mining Maximal Frequent Contiguous Sequences in Biological Data Sequences

  • Kang, Tae-Ho;Yoo, Jae-Soo;Kim, Hak-Yong;Lee, Byoung-Yup
    • International Journal of Contents
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    • v.3 no.2
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    • pp.18-24
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    • 2007
  • Biological sequences such as DNA and amino acid sequences typically contain a large number of items. They have contiguous sequences that ordinarily consist of more than hundreds of frequent items. In biological sequences analysis(BSA), a frequent contiguous sequence search is one of the most important operations. Many studies have been done for mining sequential patterns efficiently. Most of the existing methods for mining sequential patterns are based on the Apriori algorithm. In particular, the prefixSpan algorithm is one of the most efficient sequential pattern mining schemes based on the Apriori algorithm. However, since the algorithm expands the sequential patterns from frequent patterns with length-1, it is not suitable for biological datasets with long frequent contiguous sequences. In recent years, the MacosVSpan algorithm was proposed based on the idea of the prefixSpan algorithm to significantly reduce its recursive process. However, the algorithm is still inefficient for mining frequent contiguous sequences from long biological data sequences. In this paper, we propose an efficient method to mine maximal frequent contiguous sequences in large biological data sequences by constructing the spanning tree with a fixed length. To verify the superiority of the proposed method, we perform experiments in various environments. The experiments show that the proposed method is much more efficient than MacosVSpan in terms of retrieval performance.

Optimum Dosage of Fenton's Reagent for the Dyeing Wastewater by the Different Conditions of Biological Treatment as the Pre-treatment Process (염색폐수의 생물학적 전처리 조건변화에 의한 최적 펜톤시약 투입량 결정에 관한 연구)

  • Bea Joan-Sam;Lee Sang-Ho
    • Journal of Environmental Science International
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    • v.14 no.7
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    • pp.683-689
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    • 2005
  • The consecutive combination process of a biological process as the pre-treatment and a chemical process as the post-treatment is applied for the dyeing wastewater. The poor efficiency of biological treatment using pure oxygen makes the chemical treatment cost high. It is necessary to improve the efficiency of biological treatment in order to reduce the cost of chemical treatment. The purpose of this paper is to find the minimum dose of chemical reagent to fit the Discharged Water Quality Standards for the different biological treatment effluents. Results revealed that the minimum dosage of Fenton's reagent lead to save the cost of chemical treatment based on the guideline dose in the treatment plant. The possible maximum saving reagents was up to $70\%$ for the effluent of the pilot plant packed with the carrier imbedded microorganisms which were selected from the present treatment plant.

The N-terminal peptide of the main protease of SARS-CoV-2, targeting dimer interface, inhibits its proteolytic activity

  • Sunyu Song;Yeseul Kim;Kiwoong Kwak;Hyeonmin Lee;Hyunjae Park;Young Bong Kim;Hee-Jung Lee;Lin-Woo Kang
    • BMB Reports
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    • v.56 no.11
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    • pp.606-611
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    • 2023
  • The main protease (Mpro) of SARS-CoV-2 cleaves 11 sites of viral polypeptide chains and generates essential non-structural proteins for viral replication. Mpro is an important drug target against COVID-19. In this study, we developed a real-time fluorometric turn-on assay system to evaluate Mpro proteolytic activity for a substrate peptide between NSP4 and NSP5. It produced reproducible and reliable results suitable for HTS inhibitor assays. Thus far, most inhibitors against Mpro target the active site for substrate binding. Mpro exists as a dimer, which is essential for its activity. We investigated the potential of the Mpro dimer interface to act as a drug target. The dimer interface is formed of domain II and domain III of each protomer, in which N-terminal ten amino acids of the domain I are bound in the middle as a sandwich. The N-terminal part provides approximately 39% of the dimer interface between two protomers. In the real-time fluorometric turn-on assay system, peptides of the N-terminal ten amino acids, N10, can inhibit the Mpro activity. The dimer interface could be a prospective drug target against Mpro. The N-terminal sequence can help develop a potential inhibitor.

A report on 36 unrecorded bacterial species isolated from Korean islands in 2023

  • Seung Yeol Shin;Yihyun Jeon;Heeyoung Kang;Sathiyaraj Srinivasan;Myung Kyum Kim;Dong-Uk Kim;Yochan Joung;Jaeho Song
    • Journal of Species Research
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    • v.13 no.3
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    • pp.293-305
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    • 2024
  • Various samples were collected from Korean islands in order to obtain unrecorded bacterial species in 2023. After aerobically incubating on marine agar and Reasoner's 2A agar, approximately 1,200 bacterial strains were isolated and identified using 16S rRNA gene sequences. A total of 36 strains showed ≥98.7% sequence similarity to previously published and validated bacterial species. However, these strains have not previously been reported in the Republic of Korea, indicating that they belong to Korean unrecorded bacterial species. The unrecorded bacterial species were assigned to the classes Actinomycetes, Bacilli, Bacteroidia, Flavobacteriia, Sphingobacteriia, Alphaproteobacteria, Betaproteobacteria, and Gammaproteobacteria. The information we obtained by examining the strains includes details of the Gram reactions, colony and cell morphology, biochemical characteristics, and phylogenetic positions of the unrecorded species.

Enhanced In Vitro Protein Synthesis Through Optimal Design of PCR Primers

  • Ahn Jin-Ho;Son Jeong-Mi;Hwang Mi-Yeon;Kim Tae-Wan;Park Chang-Kil;Choi Cha-Yong;Kim Dong-Myung
    • Journal of Microbiology and Biotechnology
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    • v.16 no.3
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    • pp.355-359
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    • 2006
  • The functional stability of mRNA is one of the crucial factors affecting the efficiency of in vitro translation. As the rapid degradation of mRNA in the cell extract (S30 extract) causes early termination of the translational reactions, extending the mRNA half-life will improve the productivity of the in vitro protein synthesis. Thus, a simple PCR-based method is introduced to increase the stability of mRNA in an S30 extract. The target genes are PCR-amplified with primers designed to make the ends of the transcribed mRNA molecule anneal to each other. When compared with normal mRNA, the mRNA with the annealing sequences resulted in an approximately 2-fold increase of protein synthesis in an in vitro translation reaction. In addition, sequential transcription and translation reactions in a single tube enabled direct protein expression from the PCR-amplified genes without any separate purification of the mRNA.

Performance Comparison of Continuous Reactors for Bioethanol Production Based on Glycerol (글리세롤 기반의 바이오에탄올 생산을 위한 연속생산반응기의 성능 비교)

  • Lee, Sang-Jun;Song, Yoon-Seok;Kim, Sung-Bong;Kang, Sung-Woo;Han, Sung-Ok;Park, Chul-Hwan;Kim, Seung-Wook
    • KSBB Journal
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    • v.26 no.4
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    • pp.328-332
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    • 2011
  • Ethanol production using glycerol as a carbon source was performed by Enterobacter aerogenes immobilized on calcium alginate beads. To improve the ethanol production, the optimal conditions such as loading amount of immobilized cells and glycerol concentration were investigated. The optimal loading amount of immobilized cells and glycerol concentration were 10 mL of calcium alginate bead and 10 g/L, respectively. Consequently, glycerol consumption rate, ethanol concentration and yield were 0.32 g/$L{\cdot}h$, 3.38 g/L and 0.43 g/g on the batch production, respectively. Continuous production of ethanol was successfully achieved using two types of immobilized cell reactors (continuous stirred tank reactor and packed bed reactor) from 10 g/L of glycerol. In the continuous stirred tank reactor, glycerol consumption, ethanol concentration, specific productivity and yield were 9.8 g, 4.67 g/L, 1.17 g/$L{\cdot}h$, 0.48 g/g, respectively. The concentration of produced ethanol was 38-44% higher comparison to batch fermentation, and continuous stirred tank reactor showed better performance than packed bed reactor.