• Microbiology and Biotechnology Letters
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• v.45 no.4
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• pp.354-357
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• 2017

There is an increase in the presence of drug-resistant staphylococci outside of the nosocomial and healthcare setting. Although the presence of staphylococci has been studied in several public spaces, nothing is known on the presence of staphylococci in public libraries. Book surfaces from public libraries in the East London area, United Kingdom were swabbed and cultured and identity of the isolates determined by matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time of flight (MALDI-TOF) mass spectrometry (MS). Seven different staphylococcal species were identified by MALDI-TOF-MS analysis. This short study provides evidence of the presence of multidrug-resistant staphylococci in public libraries in the East London area.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Applied Pharmacology
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• 1994.04a
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• pp.41-49
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• 1994

The most common conventional method of discovering a drug involves a massive screening of a large number of compounds in chemical libraries or in the extracts from natural sources such as plants or microbial broths followed by chemical modification of one or more active compounds to improve their properties as a drug. When the three-dimensional structure of the target molecule for which the drug is searched is known the drug discovery process can be significantly simplified, This is especially true when the three-dimensional structure of a complex between the target and a lead compound is known. In this lecture our experience on the structure-based drug design for human CDK2(cyclin-dependent protein kinase 2) will be discussed with special emphasis on the strength and weakness of this approach of drug discovery. The regulation of the activity of CDK2 plays an important role in the cell proliferation of normal and cancer cells.

• Bulletin of the Korean Chemical Society
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• v.33 no.1
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• pp.128-136
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• 2012

We report the solid-phase library construction of 222 number of a novel N-[alkyl sulfonamido-spiro(2H-1-benzopyran-2,4-piperidine)-6-yl] substituted amide 1A and amine 1B derivatives. The polymer-bound N-[alkylsulfonamido-spiro(2H-1-benzopyran-2,4-piperidine)-6-yl] substituted amide 9 and amine 10 derivatives were obtained by first diversity generation with various acid chlorides and alkyl halides. Further reactions on the resins 9 and 10 with substituted sulfonyl chlorides produced the desired N-[alkylsulfonamido-spiro(2H-1-benzopyran-2,4-piperidine)-6-yl] substituted amide 1A and amine 1B analogues.

• Journal of Microbiology and Biotechnology
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• v.23 no.6
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• pp.779-784
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• 2013

Leptospirosis is a worldwide zoonosis of global concern caused by Leptospira interrogans. The availability of ligand libraries has facilitated the search for novel drug targets using chemogenomics approaches, compared with the traditional method of drug discovery, which is time consuming and yields few leads with little intracellular information for guiding target selection. Recent subtractive genomics studies have revealed the putative drug targets in peptidoglycan biosynthesis pathways in Leptospira interrogans. Aligand library for the murD ligase enzyme in the peptidoglycan pathway has also been identified. Our approach in this research involves screening of the pre-existing ligand library of murD with related protein family members in the putative drug target assembly in the peptidoglycan biosynthesis pathway. A chemogenomics approach has been implemented here, which involves screening of known ligands of a protein family having analogous domain architecture for identification of leads for existing druggable protein family members. By means of this approach, one murC and one murF inhibitor were identified, providing a platform for developing an anti-leptospirosis drug targeting the peptidoglycan biosynthesis pathway. Given that the peptidoglycan biosynthesis pathway is exclusive to bacteria, the in silico identified mur ligase inhibitors are expected to be broad-spectrum Gram-negative inhibitors if synthesized and tested in in vitro and in vivo assays.

• The Korean Journal of Malacology
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• v.29 no.3
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• pp.181-187
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• 2013

In order to investigate environmental stress inducible genes in abalone, we analyzed differentially expressed transcripts from a Pacific abalone, Haliotis discus hannai, after exposure to heat-, cold- or hyposalinity-shock by suppression subtractive hybridization (SSH) method. 1,074 unique sequences from SSH libraries were composed to 115 clusters and 986 singletons, the overall redundancy of the library was 16.3%. From the BLAST search, of the 1,316 ESTs, 998 ESTs (75.8%) were identified as known genes, but 318 clones (24.2%) did not match to any previously described genes. From the comparison results of ESTs pattern of three SSH cDNA libraries, the most abundant EST was different in each SSH library: small heat shock protein p26 (sHSP26) in heat-shock, trypsinogen 2 in cold-shock, and actin in hyposalinity SSH cDNA library. Based on sequence similarities, several response-to-stress genes such as heat shock proteins (HSPs) were identified commonly from the abalone SSH libraries. HSP70 gene was induced by environmental stress regardless of temperature-shock or salinity-stress, while the increase of sHSP26 mRNA expression was not detected in cold-shock but in heat-shock condition. These results suggest that the suppression subtractive hybridization method is an efficient way to isolate differentially expressed gene from the invertebrate environmental stress-response transcriptome.

• Genomics & Informatics
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.24-29
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• 2007

Computational virtual screening has become an essential platform of drug discovery for the efficient identification of active candidates. Moleculardocking, a key technology of receptor-centric virtual screening, is commonly used to predict the binding affinities of chemical compounds on target receptors. Despite the advancement and extensive application of these methods, substantial improvement is still required to increase their accuracy and time-efficiency. Here, we evaluate several advanced structure-based virtual screening approaches for elucidating the rank-order activity of chemical libraries, and the quantitative structureactivity relationship (QSAR). Our results show that the ensemble-average free energy estimation, including implicit solvation energy terms, significantly improves the hit enrichment of the virtual screening. We also demonstrate that the assignment of quantum mechanical-polarized (QM-polarized) partial charges to docked ligands contributes to the reproduction of the crystal pose of ligands in the docking and scoring procedure.

• Journal of Dental Anesthesia and Pain Medicine
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.165-173
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• 2016

Dentists often sedate patients in order to reduce their dental phobia and stress during dental treatment. Sedatives are administered through various routes such as oral, inhalation, and intravenous routes. Intravenous administration has the advantage of rapid onset of action, predictable duration of action, and easy titration. Typically, midazolam, propofol or dexmedetomidine are used as intravenous sedatives. Administration of these sedatives via infusion by using a syringe pump is more effective and successful than infusing them as a bolus. However, during intravenous infusion of sedatives or opioids using a syringe pump, fatal accidents may occur due to the clinician's carelessness. To prevent such risks, smart syringe pumps have been introduced clinically. They allow clinicians to perform effective sedation by using a computer to control the dose of the drug being infused. To ensure patient safety, various alarm features along with a drug library, which provides drug information and prevents excessive infusion by limiting the dose, have been added to smart pumps. In addition, programmed infusion systems and target-controlled infusion systems have also been developed to enable effective administration of sedatives. Patient-controlled infusion, which allows a patient to control his/her level of sedation through self-infusion, has also been developed. Safer and more successful sedation may be achieved by fully utilizing these new features of the smart pump.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Bioinformatics Conference
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• 2004.11a
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• pp.181-190
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• 2004

The docking and in silico ligand screening procedures can select small sets of lead -like candidates from large libraries of either commercially or synthetically available compounds; however, the vast number of such molecules make the potential size of this task enormous. To accelerate the discovery of drugs to inhibit several targets, we have exploited massively distributed computing to screen compound libraries virtually. The Korea@HOME project was launched in Feb. 2002, and one year later, more than 1200 PC's have been recruited. This has created a 31 -gigaflop machine that has already provided more than 1400 hours of CPU time. It has all owed databases of millions of compounds to be screened against protein targets in a matter of days. Now, the virtual screening software suitable for distributed environments is developed by BMD. It has been evaluated in terms of the accuracy of the scoring function and the search algorithm for the correct binding mode.

• Archives of Pharmacal Research
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• v.27 no.5
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• pp.518-523
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• 2004

An allergic reaction ensues after antigen binds to mast cell or basophil high affinity IgE receptor, Fc$\varepsilon$RI, resulting in degranulation of various inflammatory mediators that produce various allergic symptoms. In this study, i) we isolated the active component for the inhibition of mast cell degranulation from the extract of leaves of Castanea crenata and identified it as quercetin; ii) we established the total synthesis procedure of quercetin; iii) using quercetin as positive control, we excavated some lead compounds that possess inhibitory activities for mast cell degranulation by screening the chemical libraries of 1,3-oxazolidine derivatives prepared by solid phase combinatorial chemistry. Some of 1,3-oxazolidine compounds possessing acetyl and 3',4'-dichlorophenyl group displayed strong inhibitory activities on Fc$\varepsilon$RI-mediated mast cell degranulation, suggesting that they can be used as lead compounds for the development of anti-allergic agents.

• IMMUNE NETWORK
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.7-13
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• 2001

Currently 18 monoclonal antibodies were approved by FDA for inj ection into humans for therapeutic or diagnostic purpose. And 146 clinical trials are under way to evaluate the efficacy of monoclonal antibodies as anti-cancer agents, which comprise 9 % of clinical trials in cancer therapy field. When considering a lot of disappointment and worries existed in this field during the past 15 years, this boom could be called as resurrection. Antibodies have several merits over small molecule drug. First of all it is easier and faster in development, as proper immunization of the target proteins usually raises good antibody response. The side effects of antibodies are more likely to be checked out in immunohistomchemical staining of whole human tissues. Antibody has better pharmacokinetics, which means a longer half-life. And it is non-toxic as it is purely a "natural drug. Vast array of methods was developed to get the recombinant antibodies to be used as drug. The mice with human immunoglobulin genes were generated. Fully human antibodies can be developed in fast and easy way from these mice through immunization. These mice could make even human monoclonal antibodies against any human antigen like albumin. The concept of combinatorial library was also actively adopted for this purpose. Specific antibodies can be screened out from phage, mRNA, ribosomal library displaying recombinant antibodies like single chain Fvs or Fabs. Then the coding genes of these specific antibodies are obtained from the selected protein-gene units, and used for industrial scale production. Both $na\ddot{i}ve$ and immunized libraries are proved to be effective for this purpose. In post-map arena, antibodies are receiving another spotlight as molecular probes against numerous targets screened out from functional genomics or proteomics. Actually many of these antibodies used for this purpose are already human ones. Through alliance of these two actively growing research areas, antibody would play a central role in target discovery and drug development.