• Journal of Life Science
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.41-48
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• 2012

Bee venom (BV) has been used in medicine to treat a variety of diseases including arthritis, rheumatism, and various cancers. Recent reports indicate that BV has anti-angiogenic effects, but the precise molecular mechanism underlying the effects of BV against colorectal cancer remains to be elucidated. We examined the effects of BV and its major components (melittin and apamin) on tumor angiogenesis and found that BV significantly decreased protein levels of hypoxia-inducible factor-$1{\alpha}$ (HIF-$1{\alpha}$), an important factor involved in angiogenesis and tumor progression, in human colorectal carcinoma HCT116 cells. BV also suppressed the transcription of HIF-$1{\alpha}$ under hypoxia, leading to a decrease in the expression of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), a major target gene of HIF-$1{\alpha}$. We also found that these effects were mainly elicited by apamin, but not melittin. BV specifically inhibited the phosphorylation of ERK1/2 without changing the total levels of this protein, but had no effect on kinases of p38/JNK and AKT. Our results suggest that BV may inhibit human colorectal cancer progression and angiogenesis by inhibiting HIF-$1{\alpha}$ and VEGF expression, thereby providing a novel potential mechanism for the anticancer action of BV.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.22 no.6
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• pp.599-609
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• 2021

A novel grounding system, which is presented in IEC 60364, has been adopted since 2021. A safety evaluation for the human body on the grounding system is required due to the various characteristics of the touch voltage and current passing when the human body experiences an electric shock. The Korea Electrical Safety Corporation (KESCO) and Korea Electric Association (KEA) have been conducting a safety technical education on the grounding system. On the other hand, it is difficult to instruct the electrical safety manager because of a lack of safety evaluations for the test equipment on the grounding system. Therefore, this paper modeled and implemented a test device for a safety evaluation depending on the grounding system of IEC 60364. Namely, this paper presents the modeling of the test device for a safety evaluation using PSCAD/EMTDC S/W, which is composed of an AC grid section, s test device section on the grounding system, and a sub-device section. This paper implemented a test device for safety evaluation, which consisted of an AC grid section, TT grounding system section, TN-S grounding system section, and monitoring section. From the simulation and test results with the safety characteristics of the human body in the TT and TN-S grounding system, when the fault impedances are 0[Ω], 10[Ω], and 100[Ω], the currents passing through the human body in the TT grounding system are 104[mA], 87.4[mA], and 35.5[mA], respectively. The corresponding currents in the TN-S grounding system are 54.9[mA], 4.1[mA], and 0.4[mA], respectively. Based on the results, the protection performance for an electric shock to the human body in the TN-S system is better than the TT system. This can be improved when the existing grounding system is changed from the TT system to the TN-S system.

• Journal of Korean Society of Disaster and Security
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.63-75
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• 2016

For safe water supply, residual chlorine has to be maintained in tap-water above a certain level from drinking water treatment plants to the final tap-water end-point. However, according to the current literature, approximately 30-60% of residual chlorine is being lost during the whole water supply pathways. The losses of residual chlorine may have been attributed to the current tendency for water supply managers to reduce chlorine dosage in drinking water treatment plants, aqueous phase decomposition of residual chlorine in supply pipes, accelerated chlorine decomposition at a high temperature during summer, leakage or losses of residual chlorine from old water supply pipes, and disappearances of residual chlorine in water storage tanks. Because of these, it is difficult to rule out the possibility that residual chlorine concentrations become lower than a regulatory level. In addition, it is concerned that the regulatory satisfaction of residual chlorine in water storage tanks can not always be guaranteed by using the current design method in which only storage capacity and/or hydraulic retention time are simply used as design factors, without considering other physico-chemical processes involved in chlorine disappearances in water storage tank. To circumvent the limitations of the current design method, mathematical models for aqueous chlorine decomposition, sorption of chlorine into wall surface, and mass-transfer into air-phase via evaporation were selected from literature, and residual chlorine reduction behavior in water storage tanks was numerically simulated. The model simulation revealed that the major factors influencing residual chlorine disappearances in water storage tanks are the water quality (organic pollutant concentration) of tap-water entering into a storage tank, the hydraulic dispersion developed by inflow of tap-water into a water storage tank, and sorption capacity onto the wall of a water storage tank. The findings from his work provide useful information in developing novel design and technology for minimizing residual chlorine disappearances in water storage tanks.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.508-516
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• 2010

An autonomous and automatic home mess-cleanup robot is newly developed in this paper. Thus far, vacuum-cleaners have lightened the burden of household chores but the operational labor that vacuum-cleaners entail has been very severe. Recently, a cleaning robot was commercialized to solve but it also was not successful because it still had the problem of mess-cleanup, which pertained to the clean-up of large trash and the arrangement of newspapers, clothes, etc. Hence, we develop a new home mess-cleanup robot (McBot) to completely overcome this problem. The robot needs the capability for agile navigation and a novel manipulation system for mess-cleanup. The autonomous navigational system has to be controlled for the full scanning of the living room and for the precise tracking of the desired path. It must be also be able to recognize the absolute position and orientation of itself and to distinguish the messed object that is to be cleaned up from obstacles that should merely be avoided. The manipulator, which is not needed in a vacuum-cleaning robot, has the functions of distinguishing the large trash that is to be cleaned from the messed objects that are to be arranged. It needs to use its discretion with regard to the form of the messed objects and to properly carry these objects to the destination. In particular, in this paper, we describe our approach for achieving accurate localization using RFID for home mess-cleanup robots. Finally, the effectiveness of the developed McBot is confirmed through live tests of the mess-cleanup task.

• Korean Journal of Construction Engineering and Management
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.15-24
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• 2018

Despite the recognition of the need for productivity information and its importance, the feedback of productivity information is not well-established in the construction industry. Effective use of productivity information is required to improve the reliability of construction planning. However, in many cases, on-site productivity information is hardly management effectively, but rather it relies on the experience and/or intuition of project participants. Based on the literature review and expert interviews, the authors recognized that one of the possible solutions is to develop a systematic approach in dealing with productivity information of the construction job-sites. It is required that the new system should not be burdensome to users, purpose-oriented information management, easy-to follow information structure, real-time information feedback, and productivity-related factor recognition. Based on the preliminary investigations, this study proposed a framework for a novel system that facilitate the effective management of construction productivity information. This system has utilized Sketchup software which has good user accessibility by minimizing additional data input and related workload. The proposed system has been designed to input, process, and output the pertinent information through a four-stage process: preparation, input, processing, and output. The inputted construction information is classified into Task Breakdown Structure (TBS) and Material Breakdown Structure (MBS), which are constructed by referring to the contents of the standard specification of building construction, and converted into productivity information. In addition, the converted information is also graphically visualized on the screen, allowing the users to use the productivity information from the job-site. The productivity information management system proposed in this study has been pilot-tested in terms of practical applicability and information availability in the real construction project. Very positive results have been obtained from the usability and the applicability of the system and benefits are expected from the validity test of the system. If the proposed system is used in the planning stage in the construction, the productivity information and the continuous information is accumulated, the expected effectiveness of this study would be conceivably further enhanced.

• Ecology and Resilient Infrastructure
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• v.5 no.3
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• pp.163-173
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• 2018

The biopolymer (BP) used in this study is mainly composed of xanthan gum and ${\beta}$-glucan derived from microorganism and has been introduced as a novel material for soil stabilization. However, the broad applicability of BP has been suggested in the field of geotechnical engineering while little information is available about the effects of BP on the vegetation. The goal of this study is to find the BP effects on the growth of Camelina sativa L. (Camelina) under drought condition. For more thorough evaluation of BP effects on the plant growth, we examined not only morphological but also physiological traits and gene expression patterns. After 25 days of drought treatment from germination in the soil amended with 0, 0.25, 0.5, and 1% BP, we observed that the BP concentration was strongly correlated the growth of Camelina. When plants were grown under drought stress, Camelina in 0.5% BP mixture showed better physiological parameters of the leaf stomatal conductance, electrolyte leakage and relative water content compared to those in control soil without BP. Plant recovery rate after re-watering was higher and the development of lateral root was lower in BP amended soil. RNA expression of Camelina leaf treated with/without drought for 7 and 10 days showed that aquaporin genes transporting solutes at bio-membrane, CsPIP1;4, 2;1, 2;6 and TIP1;2, 2;1, were induced more in the plants with BP amendment and drought treatment. These results suggest that the soil amended with BP has a positive effect on the transport of nutrients and waters into Camelina by improving water retention in soil under drought condition.

• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.77-86
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• 2018

For the past few years, KISTI has been servicing an online simulation execution platform, called EDISON, allowing users to conduct simulations on various scientific applications supplied by diverse computational science and engineering disciplines. Typically, these simulations accompany large-scale computation and accordingly produce a huge volume of output data. One critical issue arising when conducting those simulations on an online platform stems from the fact that a number of users simultaneously submit to the platform their simulation requests (or jobs) with the same (or almost unchanging) input parameters or files, resulting in charging a significant burden on the platform. In other words, the same computing jobs lead to duplicate consumption computing and storage resources at an undesirably fast pace. To overcome excessive resource usage by such identical simulation requests, in this paper we introduce a novel framework, called IceSheet, to efficiently manage simulation data based on execution metadata, that is, provenance. The IceSheet framework captures and stores each provenance associated with a conducted simulation. The collected provenance records are utilized for not only inspecting duplicate simulation requests but also performing search on existing simulation results via an open-source search engine, ElasticSearch. In particular, this paper elaborates on the core components in the IceSheet framework to support the search and reuse on the stored simulation results. We implemented as prototype the proposed framework using the engine in conjunction with the online simulation execution platform. Our evaluation of the framework was performed on the real simulation execution-provenance records collected on the platform. Once the prototyped IceSheet framework fully functions with the platform, users can quickly search for past parameter values entered into desired simulation software and receive existing results on the same input parameter values on the software if any. Therefore, we expect that the proposed framework contributes to eliminating duplicate resource consumption and significantly reducing execution time on the same requests as previously-executed simulations.

• Journal of Animal Science and Technology
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• v.46 no.6
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• pp.947-956
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• 2004

The primary role of lipoprotein lipase(LPL) is the hydrolysis of triglycerides(TG) from the core of triglyceride-rich lipoproteins such as chylomicrons and very low density lipoproteins in plasma. Fatty acids liberated by LPL on capillary endothelial surfaces are available for tissues as energy sources especially in muscles or for storage in the form of TG in adipose tissues. Therefore, as the candidate gene related to the carcass traits of the beef cattle, we have directly sequenced the exon 5${\sim}$exon 6 region in the bovine LPL gene for discovery of single nucleotide polymorphism(SNP) with 24 unrelated Hanwoo(Korean cattle). Novel eight sequence variants were detected: three loci on exon 5, three on intron 5 and two on exon 6. All SNPs identified were strongly linked each other, and one hundred twenty eight Hanwoo samples were genotyped one SNP on intron 5 using PCR-restriction fragment length polymorphism method by digestion with Hae III restriction enzyme. The allele frequency of the polymorphism was 0.76 and 0.24. The effects of this polymorphism on the breeding values of the carcass weight, loin muscle area, back fat thickness and marbling score were analyzed using least square methods of SAS GLM. The marbling score of BB genotype was significantly higher than those of AA and AB genotypes(P<0.05). This result indicates that this polymorphism may be associated with the variation of marbling score. Further study is warranted to investigate the phenotypic association in Hanwoo.

• KSBB Journal
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• v.24 no.4
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• pp.403-409
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• 2009

H2AX, a crucial component of chromatin, is implicated in DNA repair, cell cycle check point and tumor suppression. The aim of this study was to identify direct binding partners of H2AX to regulate cellular responses to above mechanisms. Literature reviews and bioinformatical tools were attempted intensively to find binding partners of H2AX, which resulted in identifying two potential proteins, breast cancer-1 (BRCA1) and BRCA1-associated RING domain 1 (BARD1). Although it has been reported in vivo that BRCA1 co-localizes with H2AX at the site of DNA damage, their biochemical mechanism for H2AX were however only known that the complex monoubiquitinates histone monomers, including unphosphorylated H2AX in vitro. Therefore, it is important to know whether the complex directly interacts with H2AX, and also which regions of these are specifically mediated for the interaction. Using in vitro GST pull-down assay, we present here that BRCA1 and BARD1 directly bind to H2AX. Moreover, through combinational approaches of domain analysis, fragment clonings and in vitro binding assay, we revealed molecular details of the BRCA1-H2AX and BARD1-H2AX complex. These data provide the potential evidence that each of the BRCA1 nuclear localization signal (NLS) and BARD1 BRCA1 C-terminal (BRCT) repeat domain is the novel mediator of H2AX recognition.

• Journal of Microbiology and Biotechnology
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• v.21 no.6
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• pp.637-645
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• 2011

Production of recombinant proteins by excretory expression has many advantages over intracellular expression in Escherichia coli. Hyperexpression of a secretory exoglucanase, Exg, of Cellulomonas fimi was previously shown to saturate the SecYEG pathway and result in dramatic cell death of E. coli. In this study, we demonstrated that overexpression of the PspA in the JM101(pM1VegGcexL-pspA) strain enhanced excretion of Exg to 1.65 U/ml using shake-flask cultivation, which was 80% higher than the highest yield previously obtained from the optimized JM101(pM1VegGcexL) strain. A much higher excreted Exg activity of 4.5 U/ml was further achieved with high cell density cultivation using rich media. Furthermore, we showed that the PspA overexpression strain enjoyed an elevated critical value (CV), which was defined as the largest quotient between the intracellular unprocessed precursor and its secreted mature counterpart that was still tolerable by the host cells prior to the onset of cell death, improving from the previously determined CV of 20/80 to the currently achieved CV of 45/55 for Exg. The results suggested that the PspA overexpression strain might tolerate a higher level of precursor Exg making use of the SecYEG pathway for secretion. The reduced lethal effect might be attributable to the overexpressed PspA, which was postulated to be able to reduce membrane depolarization and damage. Our findings introduce a novel strategy of the combined application of metabolic engineering and construct optimization to the attainment of the best possible E. coli producers for secretory/excretory production of recombinant proteins, using Exg as the model protein.