• Molecules and Cells
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• 제39권2호
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• pp.77-86
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• 2016

Cancer is a heterogeneous disease caused by diverse genomic alterations in oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes. Despite recent advances in high-throughput sequencing technologies and development of targeted therapies, novel cancer drug development is limited due to the high attrition rate from clinical studies. Patient-derived xenografts (PDX), which are established by the transfer of patient tumors into immunodeficient mice, serve as a platform for co-clinical trials by enabling the integration of clinical data, genomic profiles, and drug responsiveness data to determine precisely targeted therapies. PDX models retain many of the key characteristics of patients' tumors including histology, genomic signature, cellular heterogeneity, and drug responsiveness. These models can also be applied to the development of biomarkers for drug responsiveness and personalized drug selection. This review summarizes our current knowledge of this field, including methodologic aspects, applications in drug development, challenges and limitations, and utilization for precision cancer medicine.

• Genomics & Informatics
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• 제12권4호
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• pp.165-170
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• 2014

Genome-wide association (GWA) studies have found many important genetic variants that affect various traits. Since these studies are useful to investigate untyped but causal variants using linkage disequilibrium (LD), it would be useful to explore the haplotypes of single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) within the same LD block of significant associations based on high-density variants from population references. Here, we tried to make a haplotype catalog affecting body mass index (BMI) through an integrative analysis of previously published whole-genome next-generation sequencing (NGS) data of 7 representative Korean individuals and previously known Korean GWA signals. We selected 435 SNPs that were significantly associated with BMI from the GWA analysis and searched 53 LD ranges nearby those SNPs. With the NGS data, the haplotypes were phased within the LDs. A total of 44 possible haplotype blocks for Korean BMI were cataloged. Although the current result constitutes little data, this study provides new insights that may help to identify important haplotypes for traits and low variants nearby significant SNPs. Furthermore, we can build a more comprehensive catalog as a larger dataset becomes available.

• Genomics & Informatics
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• 제3권3호
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• pp.68-73
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• 2005

Pharmacogenomics research requires an intelligent integration of large-scale genomic and clinical data with public and private knowledge resources. We developed a web-based knowledge base for KPRN (Korea Pharmacogenomics Research Network, http://kprn.snubi. org/). Four major types of information is integrated; genetic variation, drug information, disease information, and literature annotation. Eighteen Korean pharmacogenomics research groups in collaboration have submitted 859 genotype data sets for 91 disease-related genes. Integrative analysis and visualization of the large collection of data supported by integrated biomedical path­ways and ontology resources are provided with a user-friendly interface and visualization engine empowered by Generic Genome Browser.

• Plant Breeding and Biotechnology
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• 제6권4호
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• pp.444-453
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• 2018

The rice bran oil contained in brown rice is composed of highly valued ingredient. Improving the content of unsaturated fatty acids in rice seed, such as oleic acid, linoleic acid, and ${\alpha}$-linolenic acid, would provide more benefit to human health. Fatty acid content is quantitative trait controlled by multiple genes. We have utilized high-density SNP data from highly advanced breeding populations to identify QTLs for fatty acid contents in brown rice. Here, we identified 51 major QTLs (M-QTLs) and 25 epistatic QTLs (EpQTLs) related to eleven fatty acid contents. Eight and four M-QTLs were pleiotropically associated with the content of different fatty acids in MT-RILs and DT-RILs, respectively. Total effect of M-QTLs for palmitic acid (16:0), oleic acid (18:1), and linoleic acid (18:2), could explain phenotypic variations of 36.7%, 63.7%, and 41% in MT-RILs, respectively. Alpha-linolenic acid which is important for a human's health could be explained phenotypic variation of 15.7% by six M-QTLs. These QTLs identified in this study can be used to improve nutritious content in rice breeding programs.

• 한국작물학회:학술대회논문집
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• 한국작물학회 2022년도 추계학술대회
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• pp.14-14
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• 2022

Greenhouse gas emissions are one of the critical factors that drive change in rice cropping systems. Within this changing system, less water irrigation and chemical fertilizer are seriously considered, as well combining precision farming technologies with irrigation control. Water and phosphorus (P) fertilizer are two of the most critical inputs in rice cultivation. Due to the lack of water availability in the system, P fertilizer is not available, especially in acidic soil conditions. Moreover, the various types of abiotic stresses, such as drought, high temperature, salinity, submergence, and limited fertilizer result in significant yield loss in the system. Even in the late stage of growth, the waves caused by diseases and insects make the field more unfruitful. Therefore, agronomists and breeders need to identify the secondary phenotypes to estimate the yield loss of when stress appears. The prediction will be clearer if we have a set of markers tagging the causal variation and the associated precise phenotype indices. Although there have been various studies for abiotic stress tolerance, we still lack functional molecular markers and phenotype indices. This is due to the underlying challenges caused by environmental factors in highly unpredictable regional and yearly environmental conditions in the field system. Pupl (phosphorus uptake 1) is still known as the first QTL associated with phosphorus uptake and have been validated in different field crops. Interestingly, some pyramiding lines of Pupl and other QTLs for other stress tolerances showed preferable phenotypes in the yield. Precise physiological studies with the help of genomics are on-going and some results will be discussed.

• 과학기술학연구
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• 제5권1호
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• pp.55-92
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• 2005

한국에서 중요한 과학적 개념의 형성과 그 사회적 유통에 기여하는 것은 미국과 유럽, 그리고 일본에서 형성, 성숙, 정립된 후에 한국으로 유입되고 수용되는 과학 지식과 한국 사회가 근대화의 과정에 형성한 제도이다. 유전적 정보라는 개념도 이러한 맥락에서 예외일 수는 없다. 유전적 정보 개념은 고전적 유전학의 틀에서 이해되는 유전, 또는 계승성의 개념에서 인간유전체 연구사업의 와중에서 등장하여 성숙한 유전체학과 생물정보학에 의해 확대 심화된 것이다. 본 연구는 서구적 개념 및 지식 생산 구조를 모델로 하는 개념적, 과학지식적, 제도적 통합성을 기준으로 한국에서 유전적 정보의 생산 구조가 어떻게 형성되어 있는가에 대한 것이다. 한국에서 1980년대 중반에 나타났던 유전공학 담론은 한국에서 분자생물학의 발달은 촉진시켰지만, 생화학-생화학교실과 같은 균형성이 없이 유전공학-유전학교실의 불균형성이 존재하게되었다. 주로 의과대학의 (인간)유전학과 혹은 유전학교실의 수와 질에 있어서의 부족함 때문에 생명과학 전체에 미치는 영향력에서도 크게 성공하지 못했고, 통합적, 거시적 발전을 이루지 못한 것으로 보인다. 유전학의 발전적 재구성이라고 할 수 있는 유전체학은 한국에서는 유럽, 미국, 일본의 인간유전체연구사업의 발전 궤적의 '기초단계' 혹은 '제 1기' 형태에는 거의 인프라, 투자, 연구개발이 없었고 기능유전체학과 단백체학을 중심으로 하는 '성숙단계' 혹은 '제 2기' 형태를 주축으로 하여 한국의 연구개발이 진행되고 있다. 유전체학과 같이 발달한 생물정보학에는 내적 구조에 이미 정보학과 연결되는 논리와 내용을 가지고 있는데, 한국에서는 정보기술(IT)의 아류 정도로 보는 편협하고 왜곡된 시각이 주도적인 가운데 시작된 것으로 보인다. 결과적으로 한국 생물정보학은 유전학 및 생명과학과의 통합적인 면에서는 결함을 노출하고 있다. 이러한 유전적 정보의 생산 구조가 가지는 문제점으로 인하여 한국에서 유전적 정보는 기초가 부실한 편이며 파편화된 유형으로 생산되어 나올 개연성을 가진다. 개념적, 제도적인 파편화의 사례는 개인식별의 유전학이 기존의 유전공학-유전학교실 체제로 흡수되지 못하고 의과대학 법의학교실에서 전문성과 연구실천을 확보한 것에서도 확인된다. 유전적 정보의 생산 구조에 영향을 미치는 환경은 한국의 생명공학과 시민사회운동으로 존재한다.

• Asian-Australasian Journal of Animal Sciences
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• 제29권10호
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• pp.1515-1521
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• 2016

Anethole and garlic have an immune modulatory effects on avian coccidiosis, and these effects are correlated with gene expression changes in intestinal epithelial lymphocytes (IELs). In this study, we integrated gene expression datasets from two independent experiments and investigated gene expression profile changes by anethole and garlic respectively, and identified gene expression signatures, which are common targets of these herbs as they might be used for the evaluation of the effect of plant herbs on immunity toward avian coccidiosis. We identified 4,382 and 371 genes, which were differentially expressed in IELs of chickens supplemented with garlic and anethole respectively. The gene ontology (GO) term of differentially expressed genes (DEGs) from garlic treatment resulted in the biological processes (BPs) related to proteolysis, e.g., "modification-dependent protein catabolic process", "proteolysis involved in cellular protein catabolic process", "cellular protein catabolic process", "protein catabolic process", and "ubiquitin-dependent protein catabolic process". In GO analysis, one BP term, "Proteolysis", was obtained. Among DEGs, 300 genes were differentially regulated in response to both garlic and anethole, and 234 and 59 genes were either up- or down-regulated in supplementation with both herbs. Pathway analysis resulted in enrichment of the pathways related to digestion such as "Starch and sucrose metabolism" and "Insulin signaling pathway". Taken together, the results obtained in the present study could contribute to the effective development of evaluation system of plant herbs based on molecular signatures related with their immunological functions in chicken IELs.

• 대한의생명과학회지
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• 제21권4호
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• pp.181-187
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• 2015

Osteoporosis is one of the diseases caused by accumulation of effects from complex interactions between genetic and environmental factors. Aging is the major cause for osteoporosis, which normally increases skeletal fragility and bone fracture especially among the elder. "Omics" refers to a specialized research field dealing with high-throughput biological data, such as genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics or metabolomics. Integration of data from multi-omics has been approved to be a powerful strategy to colligate biological phenomenon with multiple aspects. Actually, integrative analyses of "omics" datasets were used to present pathogenesis of specific diseases or casual biomarkers including susceptible genes. In this study, we evaluated the proposed relationship of novel susceptible genes (TREML2, HTR1E, and GLO1) with osteoporosis, which genes were obtained using multi-omics integration analyses. To this end, SNPs of the susceptible genes in the Korean female cohort were analyzed. As a result, one SNP of HTR1E and five SNPs of TREML2 were identified to associate with osteoporosis. The highest significant SNP was $rs6938076^*$ of TREML2 (OR=0.63, CI: 0.45~0.89, recessive P=0.009). Consequently, the susceptible genes identified through the multi-omics analyses were confirmed to have association with osteoporosis. Therefore, multi-omics analysis might be a powerful tool to find new genes associated with a disease. We further identified that TREML2 has more associated with osteoporosis in females than did HTR1E.

• Genomics & Informatics
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• 제7권2호
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• pp.122-130
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• 2009

A systems biology approach for the identification of perturbed molecular functions is required to understand the complex progressive disease such as breast cancer. In this study, we analyze the microarray data with Gene Ontology terms of molecular functions to select perturbed molecular functional modules in breast cancer tissues based on the definition of Gene ontology Functional Code. The Gene Ontology is three structured vocabularies describing genes and its products in terms of their associated biological processes, cellular components and molecular functions. The Gene Ontology is hierarchically classified as a directed acyclic graph. However, it is difficult to visualize Gene Ontology as a directed tree since a Gene Ontology term may have more than one parent by providing multiple paths from the root. Therefore, we applied the definition of Gene Ontology codes by defining one or more GO code(s) to each GO term to visualize the hierarchical classification of GO terms as a network. The selected molecular functions could be considered as perturbed molecular functional modules that putatively contributes to the progression of disease. We evaluated the method by analyzing microarray dataset of breast cancer tissues; i.e., normal and invasive breast cancer tissues. Based on the integration approach, we selected several interesting perturbed molecular functions that are implicated in the progression of breast cancers. Moreover, these selected molecular functions include several known breast cancer-related genes. It is concluded from this study that the present strategy is capable of selecting perturbed molecular functions that putatively play roles in the progression of diseases and provides an improved interpretability of GO terms based on the definition of Gene Ontology codes.

• Genomics & Informatics
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• 제20권2호
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• pp.20.1-20.13
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• 2022

Recent studies have focused on the early detection of ovarian cancer (OC) using tumor materials by liquid biopsy. The mechanisms of microRNAs (miRNAs) to impact OC and signaling pathways are still unknown. This study aims to reliably perform functional analysis of previously validated circulating miRNAs' target genes by using pathfindR. Also, overall survival and pathological stage analyses were evaluated with miRNAs' target genes which are common in the The Cancer Genome Atlas and GTEx datasets. Our previous studies have validated three downregulated miRNAs (hsa-miR-885-5p, hsa-miR-1909-5p, and hsa-let7d-3p) having a diagnostic value in OC patients' sera, with high-throughput techniques. The predicted target genes of these miRNAs were retrieved from the miRDB database (v6.0). Active-subnetwork-oriented Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathway enrichment analysis was conducted by pathfindR using the target genes. Enrichment of KEGG pathways assessed by the analysis of pathfindR indicated that 24 pathways were related to the target genes. Ubiquitin-mediated proteolysis, spliceosome and Notch signaling pathway were the top three pathways with the lowest p-values (p < 0.001). Ninety-three common genes were found to be differentially expressed (p < 0.05) in the datasets. No significant genes were found to be significant in the analysis of overall survival analyses, but 24 genes were found to be significant with pathological stages analysis (p < 0.05). The findings of our study provide in-silico evidence that validated circulating miRNAs' target genes and enriched pathways are related to OC and have potential roles in theranostics applications. Further experimental investigations are required to validate our results which will ultimately provide a new perspective for translational applications in OC management.