• Journal of Korean society of Dental Hygiene
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.13-24
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• 2009

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between the dietary habits and oral health of elderly people in an attempt to pave the way for the development of oral health promotion programs geared toward improving the quality of life of the elderly. The subjects in this study were senior citizens who were selected by convenience sampling from Seoul. The findings of the study were as follows: 1. Regarding subjective oral health state, 54.5% of the elderly people, more than the half, considered their mouth to be in good health. The number of their mean remaining permanent teeth was 13.71. 47.5 percent of the senior citizens investigated had no shaking teeth. 2. Those who found themselves to be in good oral health had meals on a regular basis(p=0.022) and ate detergent food often. The gaps between them and the others was significant(p=0.005). In contrast, the elderly people who were in a bad oral health frequently ate cariogenic food(p=0.044). 3. The elderly people who had 21 teeth or more ate detergent food often(p=0.029), and those who owned no teeth had a sweet teeth(p=0.003), ate more cariogenic food(p=0.001) and had a snack frequently(p=0.026). 4. The subjective oral health status had a positive correlation to detergent food intake(r=0.23) and had a slightly negative correlation to preference for sweets(r=-0.14), cariogenic food intake(r=-0.14) and snack intake(r=-0.06). The number of tooth was positively correlated to detergent food intake(r=0.23) and negatively to preference for sweets(r=0.32), cariogenic food intake(r=-0.30) and snack intake(r=-0.21). The presence or absence of shaking teeth had a positive correlation to snack intake(r=0.14). The above-mentioned findings suggested that the dietary habits of the elderly people had a statistically significant relationship to subjective and objective oral health state, which indicated that there was a close relationship between oral health and dietary habits. Therefore how to improve dietary habits as well as oral health should be taken into account when oral health promotion programs are developed for the sake of the elderly. That would contribute to promoting the oral health of elderly people and eventually boosting their quality of life.

• Journal of Life Science
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• v.15 no.3 s.70
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• pp.374-381
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• 2005

The production of functional foods providing health benefit is one of the fast growing fields in the food industry. Mannitol as GRAS (generally recognized as safe) is a functional food. Mannitol is about $70\%$ as sweet as sucrose and slowly and incompletely absorbed from the intestine, suppling only about one-half energy value of glucose. Commercially, the mannitol is synthesized by catalytic or electrochemical reduction of glucose. However, as strong demand for natural products increased, biological techniques have been developed for mannitol production. The object of this study was to determine the optimum conditions of mannitol fermentation by Leuconostoc mesenteroides sp. strain JFY isolated from fermented vegetables. The processes parameters such as pH, temperature, yeast extract concentration, and fructose concentration were optimized. The chosen ranges were 4.5 to 7.5 for pH, 22 to $34^{\circ}C$ for temperature, 0.05 to $2.0\%$ for yeast extract. and 5 to 350 g/L for fructose. The mineral medium used consisted of 3.0g $KH_2PO_4,\;0.01g\;FeSO_4{\cdot}H_2O,\;0.01g\;MnSO_4{\cdot}4H_2O,\;0.2g\; MgSO_4{\cdot}7H_2O,\;0.01g\;NaCl,\;and\;0.05g\;CaCl_2$ per 1 liter of deionized water. The optimum values of pH, temperature, yeast extract, and fructose concentration were obtained at about pH 6.5, temperature $28^{\circ}C$, yeast extract $0.5\%$ and fructose 30g/L. At optimum condition, the production of mannitol amounted to 31.6g/l. We hope that these findings are of particular importance for industrial application of mannitol production.

• Journal of Life Science
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• v.27 no.2
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• pp.241-246
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• 2017

The walls of guard cells have many different specialized features. Guard cells are present in leaves of bryophytes, ferns and almost all of the vascular plants. Guard cells show considerable morphological diversities. It is understood that the stomata show two types in terms of morphological characterizations of guard cells. The first type is only found in a few monocots including Poaceae and Cyperaceae. In rice and corn, guard cells have the morphological characteristics of dumbbell shape. The morphological characteristics of dumbbell shape always have subsidiary cells. The other type is found in every dicots and many monocots and they are kidney-shaped guard cells. The plants of kidney-shaped guard cells rarely have subsidiary cells except Commelina communis L. Therefore, it could be concluded that two types of the morphological characteristics of guard cells cannot divide according to monocots or dicots. Every plants in which stomatal characteristic features were all different, most of them belong to kidney-shaped guard cells. However in case of Sedum sarmentosum, guard cells were shown to be long and narrow lips type. In Tradescantia virginiana, the shape of guard cells could be called perfectly to half-moon type. Therefore, it could be concluded that kidney-shaped types are all different in some way, but dumbbell-shaped types are almost constant.

• Applied Microscopy
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• v.32 no.2
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• pp.175-183
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• 2002

In this study, we carried out immunostaining and immunogold labeling with rabbit anti-dopamine (TH) and rabbit anti-calbindin-$D_{28K}$ to examine the characteristics and functions of the neurons that secrete neurotransmitters in optic lobes of Todarodes pacificus and Octopus minor inhabiting the Korean waters. The obtained results are as follow. In the immunostaining with anti-dopamine, only a few of the large amacrine cells in an the upper part of an outer granule cell layer and the cells forming the islands of medulla showed positive reaction in Todarodes pacificus, while $2{\sim}3$ cells in the upper and middle parts of an outer granule cell layer and more than 5 cells in the islands of medulla reacted positively in Octopus minor. For the case of anti-calbindin case, $2{\sim}3$ small amacrine cells in the upper portion of the outer granule cell layer and $1{\sim}2$ cells which are located in the lower part of an inner granule cell layer showed positive reaction in Todarodes pacificus, while, in Octopus minor, 4 cells in the outer granule cell layer reacted positively, no immunoreactive cell being found in the inner granule cell layer. As a result of performing the immunogold labeling, relative large number ($17{\sim}26$) of gold particles were labeled per $0.5{\mu}m^2$ of the cytoplasm of the cells which showed the immunoreactivity to the anti-dopamine and anti-calbindin in Todarodes pacificus, however, small number (10) of gold particles were labeled in Octopus minor, which reach only half of the number in the Todarodes pacificus.

• The Journal of Dong Guk Oriental Medicine
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• v.10
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• pp.161-175
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• 2008

The '$\bar{A}yurveda$', Buddhistic medicine, and the present of traditional medicine can be summed up as thus. 1. The '$\bar{A}yurveda$' is a transliteration of the Sanskrit Ayur - veda and is a compound of the words 'Ayus(life)' and 'Veda(knowledge)' and means "The study of life", which means the preservation of health and the understanding and curing of diseases. 2. The '$\bar{A}yurveda$', which originated from ancient experience, was recorded in Sanskrit, which was a theorization of knowledge, and also was written in verses to make memorizing easy, and made medicine the exclusive possession of the Brahmin. The first annotations were 1060 for the "Charaka", 1200 for the "Sushruta", 1150 for the "Ashtanga Sangraha samhita", and 1100 for the "Nidana". The use of various mineral medicines in the "Charaka" or the use of mercury as internal medicine in the "Ashtanga Sangraha samhita", and the palpation of the pulse for diagnosing in the '$\bar{A}yurveda$' and XiZhang' medicine are similar to TCM's pulse diagnostics. The coexistence with Arabian 'Unani' medicine, compromise with western medicine and the reactionism trend restored the '$\bar{A}yurveda$ today. 3. When we look at the present of the education and research of the '$\bar{A}yurveda$', after gaining independence from England, India set up a modern education system of the '$\bar{A}yurveda$' and set it on an equal position with western medicine. According to the 1976 study the '$\bar{A}yurveda$' is taught in a 5 and a half year university curriculum, and the main textbooks are the Charaka - samhita("開羅迦集" - internal medicine), Sushruta-samhita("妙聞集", surgery), Madhavanidana(diagnostics), 3 volumes of Bhavaprakasa(pharmacology internal medicine, mineral medicine}, Rajanighantu (pharmacology), $Vrks\bar{A}yurveda$(plant therapy), Mahabharata(military medicine), Arthasastra(forensic medicine, toxicology) Kamasastra(science of intercourse), etc. in 10 subjects and there are 232227 certified doctors that have graduated from the 95 colleges and passed the exams.

• 한국균학회소식:학술대회논문집
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• 2014.10a
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• pp.11-11
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• 2014

Fungal pathogens have huge impact on health and economic wellbeing of human by causing life-threatening mycoses in immune-compromised patients or by destroying crop plants. A key determinant of fungal pathogenesis is their ability to undergo developmental change in response to host or environmental factors. Genetic pathways that regulate such morphological transitions and adaptation are therefore extensively studied during the last few decades. Given that epigenetic as well as genetic components play pivotal roles in development of plants and mammals, contribution of microbial epigenetic counterparts to this morphogenetic process is intriguing yet nearly unappreciated question to date. To bridge this gap in our knowledge, we set out to investigate histone modifications among epigenetic mechanisms that possibly regulate fungal adaptation and processes involved in pathogenesis of a model plant pathogenic fungus, Magnaporthe oryzae. M. oryzae is a causal agent of rice blast disease, which destroys 10 to 30% of the rice crop annually. Since the rice is the staple food for more than half of human population, the disease is a major threat to global food security. In addition to the socioeconomic impact of the disease it causes, the fungus is genetically tractable and can undergo well-defined morphological transitions including asexual spore production and appressorium (a specialized infection structure) formation in vitro, making it a model to study fungal development and pathogenicity. For functional and comparative analysis of histone modifications, a web-based database (dbHiMo) was constructed to archive and analyze histone modifying enzymes from eukaryotic species whose genome sequences are available. Histone modifying enzymes were identified applying a search pipeline built upon profile hidden Markov model (HMM) to proteomes. The database incorporates 22,169 histone-modifying enzymes identified from 342 species including 214 fungal, 33 plants, and 77 metazoan species. The dbHiMo provides users with web-based personalized data browsing and analysis tools, supporting comparative and evolutionary genomics. Based on the database entries, functional analysis of genes encoding histone acetyltransferases and histone demethylases is under way. Here I provide examples of such analyses that show how histone acetylation and methylation is implicated in regulating important aspects of fungal pathogenesis. Current analysis of histone modifying enzymes will be followed by ChIP-Seq and RNA-seq experiments to pinpoint the genes that are controlled by particular histone modifications. We anticipate that our work will provide not only the significant advances in our understanding of epigenetic mechanisms operating in microbial eukaryotes but also basis to expand our perspective on regulation of development in fungal pathogens.

• Journal of the East Asian Society of Dietary Life
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.289-300
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• 1997

Newborn dog chymosin was extracted from the stomachs of dogs of 2 weeks of age, and was purified by ion exchange chromatography. Half of the sequence was determined by amino acid sequencing and the complete sequence was deduced from a cloned chymosin cDNA Results showed that the zymogen showed 79% sequence identity with calf prochymosin and 54% identity with porcine pepsinogen A The size of the propart and location of the residue which becomes the amino-terminus in the active enzyme was the same in the prochymosins. The maximum general proteolytic activity at pH 3.2 of newborn dog chymosin was 3-4% of that of porcine pepsin A at pH 2, whereas the milk clotting activity relative to the general proteolytic activity of newborn dog chymosin was much higher than that of calf chymosin. Agar gel electrophoresis at pH 5.2 of stomach extracts of individual dogs showed the existence of two predominant genetic variants of zymogen and enzyme. The two variants could not be distinguished by amino acid composition or amino-terminal sequencing, and no differences in the enzymatic properties of the genetic variants were observed. It was concluded that of the residues that participate in the substrate binding, calf and newborn dog chymosin differ in the following positions (porcine pepsin numbering, subsites in parentheses) : Ser 12 Thr(S$_4$), Leu 30 Val(S$_1$/S$_3$), His 74 Gln(S'$_2$), Val 111 Ile(S$_1$/S$_3$), Lys 220 Met(S$_4$). With regard to the low general proteolytic activity of newborn dog chymosin, the substitution Asp303 Val relative to calf chymosin may contribute to an explanation of this.

• Journal of Life Science
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• v.26 no.8
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• pp.921-927
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• 2016

Postprandial hyperglycemia is an early defect of type 2 diabetes and one of primary anti-diabetic targets. The alpha-glucosidase inhibitors regulate postprandial hyperglycemia by impeding the rate of carbohydrate (such as starch) digestion in the small intestine. This study was designed to investigate the inhibitory actions of mulberry fruit extract (MFE) on α-glucosidase and α-amylase activities, and its alleviating effect on postprandial hyperglycemia activities in vitro and in vivo. Male four-week old ICR mice and streptozotocin (STZ)-induced diabetic mice were treated with mulberry fruit extract. MFE showed strong inhibitory effects against α-glucosidase and α-amylase activities, with half-maximal inhibitory concentration (IC₅₀) values of 0.16 and 0.14 mg/ml, respectively, and was more effective than acarbose, which was used as a positive control. The increase in postprandial blood glucose levels was more significantly attenuated in the MFE-administered group mice than in the control group mice of both STZ-induced diabetic and normal mice. Moreover, the area under the glucose response curve significantly decreased following MFE administration in diabetic mice. These results indicate that MFE may be a potent inhibitor of α-glucosidase and α-amylase, and helpful in suppressing postprandial hyperglycemia in diabetic mice. The mulberry fruit extracts may be considered as a potential candidate for the management of diabetes.

• Journal of Life Science
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• v.17 no.11
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• pp.1517-1522
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• 2007

Gap junction channels formed by two adjacent cells allow the passage of small molecules up to ${\sim}\;1\;kDa$ between them. Hemichannel (connexon or half of gap junction) also behaves as a membrane channel like sodium or potassium channels in a single cell membrane. Among 26 types of connexin (Cx), $Cx32^*43E1$ (a chimera in which the first extracellular loop of Cx32 has been replaced with that of Cx43), Cx38, Cx46, and Cx50 form functional hemichannels as well as gap junction channels. Although it is known that Xenopus oocytes express endogenous connexin 38 (Cx38), its biophysical characteristics at single channel level are poorly understood. In this study, we performed single channel recordings from single Xenopus oocytes to acquire the biophysical properties of Cx38 including voltage-dependent gating and permeation (conductance and selectivity). The voltage-dependent fast and slow gatings of Cx38 hemichannel are distinct. Fast gating events occur at positive potentials and their open probabilities are low. In contrast, slow gatings dominate at negative potentials with high open probabilites. Based on hi-ionic experiments, Cx38 hemichannel is anion-selective. It will be interesting to test whether charged amino acid residues in the amino terminus of Cx38 are responsible for voltage gatings and permeation.

• Journal of Life Science
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• v.26 no.7
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• pp.855-867
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• 2016

The horse is relatively earlier domesticated animal species. Domesticated horses have been selected for their ability of racing, robustness, and disease-resistance. As a result, the thoroughbred horse genome has been condensed many genotypes related to exercise ability. In recent years, with the advent of NGS technologies, many studies were concentrated on finding superior genetic species in the horse genome in terms of genomics. Consequently, GWAS (Genome-wide Association study) is applied to horse genome, then genetic marker is revealed for superior racing ability. In addition, RNA-Seq is utilized as a method for analyze of whole transcript profiling in specific samples. By using this approach, specific gene expression patterns and transcript sequences can be revealed in various samples such as each individual, before and after exercise state, and each tissue. DNA methylation, a strong factor that regulate gene expression without the change of DNA sequence, have got a lot of attention. In horse genome, exercise- or individual-specific DNA methylation patterns were detected, and could be useful to develop selective marker of superior horses. MicroRNAs inhibit gene expression, and transposable elements accounted for half of the mammalian genome. These two elements are the crucial factors in functional genomics, and could be applied to the selection of superior horses. As the functional genomics and epigenomics advance, then these technologies introduced in this paper were applied to select superior horses. In this paper, the studies for selection of superior horses through genetic technologies, and development possibilities of these studies were discussed.