• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.182-189
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• 2010

This paper defines the quorum-based fault-tolerant mutual exclusion problem in a message-passing asynchronous system and determines a failure detector to solve the problem. This failure detector, which we call the modal failure detector star, and which we denote by $M^*$, is strictly weaker than the perfect failure detector P but strictly stronger than the eventually perfect failure detector ◇P. The paper shows that at any environment, the problem is solvable with $M^*$.

• Journal of Dairy Science and Biotechnology
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• v.32 no.2
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• pp.141-145
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• 2014

There is a burgeoning number of products on the market that contain probiotics, but do they do you any good? What exactly are probiotics? They have been defined as living organisms that, when ingested in sufficient quantities, provide health benefits beyond basic nutrition. They are often referred to as "friendly bacteria" or "good bacteria." Probiotics have been claimed, amongst other things, to (i) reduce the incidence of colon cancer and other diseases of the colon, such as IBS, (ii) stimulate the immune system, (iii) have anti-hypertensive and anti-cholesterolemic properties, (iv) mitigate against the effect of antibiotics on the intestinal microbiota, and (v) protect against gastrointestinal infections. However, the scientific basis for many of these claims is not well-established. Indeed, the European Food Safety Authority has denied the use of several health claims associated with probiotics, particularly those related to mitigation of diarrhea following consumption of antibiotics. Thus, there is a need for research on the mechanisms of action of probiotics. We have been mainly interested in the use of probiotics to control enteric infections. There are several possible modes of action to explain how probiotics may protect the host from enteric pathogens, including competitive exclusion and immunomodulation. We have shown that probiotics produce bioactive molecules that interfere with bacterial cell-cell communication (also called quorum sensing), and this results in a down-regulation of virulence genes that are responsible for attachment of the pathogen to the gastrointestinal epithelium. These bioactive molecules act on a variety of bacteria, including enterohemorrhagic and enterotoxigenic Escherichia coli, Salmonella, Clostridium difficile and Clostridium perfringens, and there is evidence that they can inhibit the formation of biofilms by Listeria monocytogenes. These bioactive molecules, which are peptidic in nature, can exert their effects not only in vitro but also in vivo, and we have shown that they mitigate against E. coli O157:H7 and Salmonella in mice and Salmonella and E. coli K88 infections in pigs. They can be delivered in foods such as yoghurt and maintain their activity.

• Journal of the Society of Cosmetic Scientists of Korea
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• v.46 no.1
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• pp.23-29
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• 2020

The skin is colonized by a large number of microorganisms with a stable composition of species. However, disease states of skin such as acne vulgaris, psoriasis, and atopic dermatitis have specific microbiome compositions that are different from those of healthy skin. The target modulation of the skin microbiome can be a potential treatment for these skin diseases. Quorum sensing (QS), a bacterial cell-cell communication system, can control the survival of bacteria and increase cell density. Also, QS affects the pathogenicity of bacteria such as biofilm formation and protease production. In this study, we confirmed anti-QS activity of Amorepacific patented ingredients, which are Lactobacillus ferment lysate (using Lactobacillus plantarum APsulloc 331261, KCCM 11179P) through bio-reporter bacterial strain Chromobacterium violaceum. The purple pigment production of C. violaceum controlled by QS was reduced 27.3% by adding 10 ㎍/mL of Lactobacillus ferment lysate (freeze dried). In addition, the Lactobacillus ferment lysate increased growth of Staphylococcus epidermidis 12% and decreased growth of Pseudomonas aeruginosa 38.5% and its biofilm formation 17.7% at a concentration of 10 ㎍/mL compared to the untreated control group. Moreover, S. epidermidis was co-cultured with the representative dermatological bacterium Staphylococcus aureus in the same genus, the growth of S. epidermidis was increased 134 % and the growth of S. aureus was decreased 13%. These results suggest that fermented lysate using Lactobacillus plantarum APsulloc 331261 may be useful as a cosmetic ingredient that can control the balance of skin microbiome.

• Journal of Microbiology and Biotechnology
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.139-144
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• 2016

Synthetic oscillators are gene circuits in which the protein expression will change over time. The delay of transcription, translation, and protein folding is used to form this kind of behavior. Here, we tried to design a synthetic oscillator by a negative feedback combined with a positive feedback. With the mutant promoter P_LacC repressed by LacIq and P_Lux activated by AHL-bound LuxR, two gene circuits, Os-LAA and Os-ASV, were constructed and introduced into LacI-deleted E. coli DH5α cells. When glucose was used as the carbon source, a low level of fluorescence was detected in the culture, and the bacteria with Os-ASV showed no oscillation, whereas a small portion of those carrying Os-LAA demonstrated oscillation behavior with a period of about 68.3 ± 20 min. When glycerol was used as the carbon source, bacteria with Os-ASV demonstrated high fluorescence value and oscillation behavior with the period of about 121 ± 21 min.

• Korean Journal of Microbiology
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• v.46 no.3
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• pp.240-247
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• 2010

Pseudomonas aeruginosa is a Gram (-) opportunistic human pathogen causing a wide variety of infections on lung, urinary tract, eyes, and burn wound sites and quorum sensing (QS), a cell density-sensing mechanism plays an essential role in Pseudomonas pathogenesis. In order to investigate the importance of QS in the Pseudomonas infections of Korean patients, we isolated 189 clinical strains of P. aeruginosa from the patients in Pusan Paik Hospital, Busan, South Korea. The QS signal production of these clinical isolates was measured by signal diffusion assay on solid media using reporter strains. While most clinical strains (79.4%) produced the QS signals as similar level as a wild type strain, PAO1 did, where LasR, the initial QS signal sensor-regulator was fully activated, a minority of them (4.2%) produced much less QS signals at the level to which LasR failed to respond. Similarly, while 72.5% of the clinical isolates produced QS signals enough to activate QscR, an another QS signal sensor-regulator, some few of them (9%) produced the QS signals at much lower level where QscR was not activated. For further analysis, we selected 74 clinical strains that were obtained from the patients under suspicion of Pseudomonas infection and investigated the total protease activity that is considered important for virulence. Interestingly, significant portion of them showed very low protease activity (44.6%) or no detectable protease activity (12.2%). When the biofilm-forming ability that is considered very important in chronic infection was examined, most isolates showed lower biofilm-forming activity than PAO1. Similarly, significant portion of clinical isolates showed reduced motility (reduced swarming activity in 51.4% and reduced twitching activity in 41.9%), or non-detectable motility (swarming-negative in 28.4% and twitching-negative in 28.4%). Our result showed that the clinical isolates that produced QS signals at the similar level to wild type could have significantly reduced activities in the protease production, biofilm formation, and motility, and some clinical isolates had unique patterns of motility, biofilm formation, and protease production that are not correlated to their QS activity.

• Journal of Microbiology and Biotechnology
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• v.26 no.4
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• pp.684-692
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• 2016

Acute respiratory virus infectious diseases are a growing health problem, particularly among children and the elderly. Much effort has been made to develop probiotics that prevent influenza virus infections by enhancing innate immunity in the respiratory tract until vaccines are available. Lactobacillus plantarum GB-LP2, isolated from a traditional Korean fermented vegetable, has exhibited preventive effects on influenza virus infection in mice. To identify the molecular basis of this strain, we conducted a whole-genome assembly study. The single circular DNA chromosome of 3,284,304 bp was completely assembled and 3,250 protein-encoding genes were predicted. Evolutionarily accelerated genes related to the phenotypic trait of anti-infective activities for influenza virus were identified. These genes encode three integral membrane proteins, a teichoic acid export ATP-binding protein and a glucosamine - fructose-6-phosphate aminotransferase involved in host innate immunity, the nonspecific DNA-binding protein Dps, which protects bacteria from oxidative damage, and the response regulator of the three-component quorum-sensing regulatory system, which is related to the capacity of adhesion to the surface of the respiratory tract and competition with pathogens. This is the first study to identify the genetic backgrounds of the antiviral activity in L. plantarum strains. These findings provide insight into the anti-infective activities of L. plantarum and the development of preventive probiotics.

• Journal of Microbiology and Biotechnology
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• v.19 no.8
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• pp.765-773
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• 2009

Edwardsiella tarda is a pathogen with a broad host range that includes human and animals. The E. tarda hemolysin (Eth) system, which comprises EthA and EthB, is a noted virulence element that is widely distributed in pathogenic isolates of E. tarda. Previous study has shown that the expression of ethB is regulated by iron, which suggests the possibility that the ferric uptake regulator (Fur) is involved in the regulation of ethB. The work presented in this report supports the previous findings and demonstrates that ethB expression was decreased under conditions when the E. tarda Fur ($Fur_{Et}$) was overproduced, and enhanced when $Fur_{Et}$ was inactivated. We also identified a second ethB regulator, EthR, which is a transcription regulator of the GntR family. EthR represses ethB expression by direct interaction with the ethB promoter region. In addition to ethB, EthR also modulates, but positively, luxS expression and AI-2 production by binding to the luxS promoter region. The expression of ethR itself is subject to negative autoregulation; interference with this regulation by overexpressing ethR during the process of infection caused (i) drastic changes in ethB and luxS expressions, (ii) vitiation in the tissue dissemination and survival ability of the bacterium, and (iii) significant attenuation of the overall bacterial virulence. These results not only provide new insights into the regulation mechanisms of the Eth hemolysin and LuxS/AI-2 quorum sensing systems but also highlight the importance of these systems in bacterial virulence.

• Journal of Microbiology and Biotechnology
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• v.30 no.2
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• pp.187-195
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• 2020

To understand the molecular mechanism involved in the survivability of cold-tolerant lactic acid bacteria was of great significance in food processing, since these bacteria play a key role in a variety of low-temperature fermented foods. In this study, the cold-stress response of probiotic Lactobacillus plantarum K25 isolated from Tibetan kefir grains was analyzed by iTRAQ proteomic method. By comparing differentially expressed (DE) protein profiles of the strain incubated at 10℃ and 37℃, 506 DE proteins were identified. The DE proteins involved in carbohydrate, amino acid and fatty acid biosynthesis and metabolism were significantly down-regulated, leading to a specific energy conservation survival mode. The DE proteins related to DNA repair, transcription and translation were up-regulated, implicating change of gene expression and more protein biosynthesis needed in response to cold stress. In addition, two-component system, quorum sensing and ABC (ATP-binding cassette) transporters also participated in cell cold-adaptation process. These findings provide novel insight into the cold-resistance mechanism in L. plantarum with potential application in low temperature fermented or preserved foods.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.7 no.8
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• pp.1890-1910
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• 2013

Routing overlay offers an ideal methodology to improve the end-to-end communication performance by deriving a backup path for any node pair. This paper focuses on a challenging issue of selecting a proper backup path to bypass the failures on the default path with high probability for any node pair. For existing backup path selection approaches, our trace-driven evaluation results demonstrate that the backup and default paths for any node pair overlap with high probability and hence usually fail simultaneously. Consequently, such approaches fail to derive a robust backup path that can take over in the presence of failure on the default path. In this paper, we propose a three-phase RBPS approach to identify a proper and robust backup path. It utilizes the traceroute probing approach to obtain the fine-grained topology information, and systematically employs the grid quorum system and the Bloom filter to reduce the resulting communication overhead. Two criteria, delay and fault-tolerant ability on average, of the backup path are proposed to evaluate the performance of our RBPS approach. Extensive trace-driven evaluations show that the fault-tolerant ability of the backup path can be improved by about 60%, while the delay gain ratio concentrated at 14% after replacing existing approaches with ours. Consequently, our approach can derive a more robust and available backup path for any node pair than existing approaches. This is more important than finding a backup path with the lowest delay compared to the default path for any node pair.

• Membrane and Water Treatment
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.35-45
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• 2023

Biofilms significantly affect the performance of wastewater treatment processes in which biodegradability of numerous microorganisms are actively involved, and various technologies have been applied to secure microbial biofilms. Understanding changes in biofilm characteristics by regulating expression of signaling molecules is important to control and regulate biofilms in membrane bioreactor, i.e., biofouling. This study investigated effects of addition of acyl-homoserine lactones (AHL) as a controllable factor for the microbial signaling system on biofilm formation of Pseudomonas aeruginosa PAO1 and multiple strains in membrane bioreactor. The addition of three AHL, i.e., C4-, C6-, and C8-HSL, at a concentration of 200 ㎍/L, enhanced the formation of the PAO1 biofilm and the degree of increases in the biofilm formation of PAO1 were 70.2%, 76.6%, and 72.9%, respectively. The improvement of biofilm formation of individual strains by C4-HSL was an average of 68%, and the microbial consortia increased by approximately 52.1% in the presence of 200 ㎍/L C4-HSL. CLSM images showed that more bacterial cells were present on the membrane surface after the AHL application. In the COMSTAT results, biomass and thickness were increased up to 2.2 times (PAO1) and 1.6 times (multi-strains) by C4-HSL. This study clearly showed that biofilm formation was increased by the application of AHL to individual strain groups, including PAO1 and microbial consortia, and significant increases were observed when 50 or 100 ㎍/L AHL was administered. This suggests that AHL application can improve the biofilm formation of microorganisms, which could yield an enhancement in efficiency of biofilm control, such as in various biofilm reactors including membrane bioreactor and bioflocculent systems in water/wastewater treatment processes.