• Safety and Health at Work
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• v.5 no.2
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• pp.43-52
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• 2014

Because information on biological agents in the workplace is lacking, biological hazard analyses at the workplace to securely recognize the harmful factors with biological basis are desperately needed. This review concentrates on literatures published after 2010 that attempted to detect biological hazards to humans, especially workers, and the efforts to protect them against these factors. It is important to improve the current understanding of the health hazards caused by biological factors at the workplace. In addition, this review briefly describes these factors and provides some examples of their adverse health effects. It also reviews risk assessments, protection with personal protective equipment, prevention with training of workers, regulations, as well as vaccinations.

• Genomics & Informatics
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• v.2 no.3
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• pp.142-146
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• 2004

Biological data and analysis tools are accumulated in distributed databases and web servers. For this reason, biologists who want to find information from the web should be aware of the various kinds of resources where it is located and how it is retrieved. Integrating the data from heterogeneous biological resources will enable biologists to discover new knowledge across the specific domain boundaries from sequences to expression, structure, and pathway. And inevitably biological databases contain noisy data. Therefore, consensus among databases will confirm the reliability of its contents. We have developed WeSAT that integrates distributed and heterogeneous biological databases and analysis tools, providing through Web Services protocols. In WeSAT, biologists are retrieved specific entries in SWISS-PROT/EMBL, PDB, and KEGG, which have annotated information about sequence, structure, and pathway. And further analysis is carried by integrated services for example homology search and multiple alignments. WeSAT makes it possible to retrieve real time updated data and analysis from the scattered databases in a single platform through Web Services.

• Genomics & Informatics
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.30-34
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• 2005

Microarray technology makes it possible to measure the expressions of tens of thousands of genes simultaneously under various experimental conditions. Identifying differentially expressed genes in each single experimental condition is one of the most common first steps in microarray gene expression data analysis. Reasonable choices of thresholds for determining differentially expressed genes are used for the next-stap-analysis with suitable statistical significances. We present a supervised model for identifying DEGs using pathway information based on the global connectivity structure. Pathway information can be regarded as a collection of biological knowledge, thus we are trying to determine the optimal threshold so that the consequential connectivity structure can be the most compatible with the existing pathway information. The significant feature of our model is that it uses established knowledge as a reference to determine the direction of analyzing microarray dataset. In the most of previous work, only intrinsic information in the miroarray is used for the identifying DEGs. We hope that our proposed method could contribute to construct biologically meaningful structure from microarray datasets.

• 제어로봇시스템학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2003.10a
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• pp.2457-2460
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• 2003

There is a great demand to manipulate biological cell autonomously since biologist should spend much time to obtain skillful manipulation techniques. For this purpose, we propose a cell chip to control, carry, fix and locate the cell. In this paper, we focus on the cell rotator to rotate individual biological cell based on a micro fluidics technology. The cell rotator consists of injection hole and rotation well to rotate a biological cell properly. Under the variation of flow rate in injection hole, the angular velocity of a biological cell is evaluated to find the feasibility of the proposed rotation method. As a practical experiment, Zebrafish egg is employed. Based on this research, we find the possibility of non-contact rotation way that can highly reduce the damage of the biological cell during manipulation. To realize an autonomous biological cell manipulation, a cell chip with manipulation well and micro channel in this research will be utilized effectively in near future.

• Journal of Species Research
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.218-220
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• 2020

A holotype is an element to which the name of a taxon is permanently attached and is key material that facilitates taxonomic research. However, type citation or designation errors due to typographical errors or inadvertent mistakes often exist. When reviewing recently published literature for the type specimens of vascular plants in the herbarium of the National Institute of Biological Resources, we observed that three species, Isoetes laosiensis, Isoetes coreana, and Huperzia jejuensis, had errors, and the actual holotype information and the type descriptions of the protologues did not match. The name Isoetes laosiensis had a collecting number error, while Isoetes coreana and Huperzia jejuensis had collector errors. According to Article 9.2 of the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants (Shenzhen code), if a holotype designation in the protologue of the name of a taxon is found to contain errors such as collector, collecting number, and illustration errors, the errors are to be corrected. We, therefore, corrected the errors in holotypes of three species, with no alterations made to the intents of the original authors.

• Molecular & Cellular Toxicology
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• v.3 no.3
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• pp.208-213
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• 2007

With the help of a development and popularization of microarray technology that enable to us to simultaneously investigate the expression pattern of thousands of genes, the toxicogenomics experimenters can interpret the genome-scale interaction between genes exposed in toxicant or toxicant-related environment. The ultimate and primary goal of toxicogenomics identifies functional context among the group of genes that are differentially or similarly coexpressed under the specific toxic substance. On the other side, public reference databases with transcriptom, proteom, and biological pathway information are needed for the analysis of these complex omics data. However, due to the heterogeneous and independent nature of these databases, it is hard to individually analyze a large omics annotations and their pathway information. Fortunately, several web sites of the public database provide information linked to other. Nevertheless it involves not only approriate information but also unnecessary information to users. Therefore, the systematically integrated database that is suitable to a demand of experimenters is needed. For these reasons, we propose SOP (Search of Omics Pathway) database system which is constructed as the integrated biological database converting heterogeneous feature of public databases into combined feature. In addition, SOP offers user-friendly web interfaces which enable users to submit gene queries for biological interpretation of gene lists derived from omics experiments. Outputs of SOP web interface are supported as the omics annotation table and the visualized pathway maps of KEGG PATHWAY database. We believe that SOP will appear as a helpful tool to perform biological interpretation of genes or proteins traced to omics experiments, lead to new discoveries from their pathway analysis, and design new hypothesis for a next toxicogenomics experiments.

• Journal of Microbiology and Biotechnology
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• v.31 no.2
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• pp.250-258
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• 2021

Among various species of marine bacteria, those belonging to the genus Halomonas have several promising applications and have been studied well. However, not much information has been available on their antibiotic resistance. In our efforts to learn about the antibiotic resistance of strain Halomonas socia CKY01, which showed production of various hydrolases and growth promotion by osmolytes in previous study, we found that it exhibited resistance to multiple antibiotics including kanamycin, ampicillin, oxacillin, carbenicillin, gentamicin, apramycin, tetracycline, and spectinomycin. However, the H. socia CKY01 resistance pattern to kanamycin, gentamicin, apramycin, tetracycline, and spectinomycin differed in the presence of 10% NaCl and 1% NaCl in the culture medium. To determine the mechanism underlying this NaCl concentration-dependent antibiotic resistance, we compared four aminoglycoside resistance genes under different salt conditions while also performing time-dependent reverse transcription PCR. We found that the aph2 gene encoding aminoglycoside phosphotransferase showed increased expression under the 10% rather than 1% NaCl conditions. When these genes were overexpressed in an Escherichia coli strain, pETDuet-1::aph2 showed a smaller inhibition zone in the presence of kanamycin, gentamicin, and apramycin than the respective control, suggesting aph2 was involved in aminoglycoside resistance. Our results demonstrated a more direct link between NaCl and aminoglycoside resistance exhibited by the H. socia CKY01 strain.

• Journal of Microbiology and Biotechnology
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• v.32 no.1
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• pp.27-36
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• 2022

Ever since bioplastics were globally introduced to a wide range of industries, the disposal of used products made with bioplastics has become an issue inseparable from their application. Unlike petroleum-based plastics, bioplastics can be completely decomposed into water and carbon dioxide by microorganisms in a relatively short time, which is an advantage. However, there is little information on the specific degraders and accelerating factors for biodegradation. To elucidate a new strain for biodegrading poly-3-hydroxybutyrate (PHB), we screened out one PHB-degrading bacterium, Microbulbifer sp. SOL03, which is the first reported strain from the Microbulbifer genus to show PHB degradation activity, although Microbulbifer species are known to be complex carbohydrate degraders found in high-salt environments. In this study, we evaluated its biodegradability using solid- and liquid-based methods in addition to examining the changes in physical properties throughout the biodegradation process. Furthermore, we established the optimal conditions for biodegradation with respect to temperature, salt concentration, and additional carbon and nitrogen sources; accordingly, a temperature of 37℃ with the addition of 3% NaCl without additional carbon sources, was determined to be optimal. In summary, we found that Microbulbifer sp. SOL03 showed a PHB degradation yield of almost 97% after 10 days. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to investigate the potent bioplastic degradation activity of Microbulbifer sp., and we believe that it can contribute to the development of bioplastics from application to disposal.

• Genomics & Informatics
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• v.5 no.4
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• pp.200-202
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• 2007

For the past several years, we have built various tools for automatic construction of biopathways to help biological experts, especially in the field of agriculture. We integrated several systems for constructing web applications for analyzing biological pathway information for agricultural species, constructing optimized pathway maps. In addition to building web applications for agricultural pathway information, we developed several stand-alone software tools, which are publicly downloadable under proper license agreements.

• The Microorganisms and Industry
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.29-34
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• 1989

It is our common understanding that biological materials like microorganisms, tissue and cell cultures, seeds, plants and animals are inevitable resources for the development of science and technology. Culture collections which are reservior of biological materials now occupy a central position in life sciences and biotechnology. The World Data Center of Microorganisms (WDC) is a infrastructure of culture collections in the world realizing quick and smooth exchanges of information and microorganisms to support research and development in those fields. The WDC was relocated from University of Queensland in Australia to out institute RIKEN in 1986. This article introduces a function for WDC in RIKEN (RIKAGAKU-KENKYUUSHO, the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research)