• The Plant Pathology Journal
• /
• v.30 no.1
• /
• pp.68-74
• /
• 2014

Chrysanthemum stunt viroid (CSVd), a noncoding infectious RNA molecule, causes seriously economic losses of chrysanthemum for 3 or 4 years after its first infection. Monomeric cDNA clones of CSVd isolate SK1 (CSVd-SK1) were constructed in the plasmids pGEM-T easy vector and pUC19 vector. Linear positive-sense transcripts synthesized in vitro from the full-length monomeric cDNA clones of CSVd-SK1 could infect systemically tomato seedlings and chrysanthemum plants, suggesting that the linear CSVd RNA transcribed from the cDNA clones could be replicated as efficiently as circular CSVd in host species. However, direct inoculation of plasmid cDNA clones containing full-length monomeric cDNA of CSVd-SK1 failed to infect tomato and chrysanthemum and linear negative-sense transcripts from the plasmid DNAs were not infectious in the two plant species. The cDNA sequences of progeny viroid in systemically infected tomato and chrysanthemum showed a few substitutions at a specific nucleotide position, but there were no deletions and insertions in the sequences of the CSVd progeny from tomato and chrysanthemum plants.

• Parasites, Hosts and Diseases
• /
• v.40 no.1
• /
• pp.45-54
• /
• 2002

Field trials evaluating selected commercially available mosquito traps variously baited with light, carbon dioxide, and/or octenol were conducted from 18-27 September 2000 in a malarious area near Paekyeon-ri (Tongil-Chon) and Camp Greaves in Paju County, Kyonggi Province, Republic of Korea. The host-seeking activity for common mosquito species, including the primary vector of Japanese encephalitis, Culex tritaeniorhynchus Giles. was determined using hourly aspirator collections from a human and propane lantern-baited Shannon trap doting hours when temperatures exceeded $15^{\circ}C$. The total number of mosquitoes and number of each species captured during the test was compared using a block design. Significant differences were observed for the total number of mosquitoes collected, such that, the Mosquito MagnetTM with octenol > Shannon trap > ABC light trap with light and dry ice > Miniature Black Light trap (manufactured by John W. Hock) $\geq$ New Jersey Trap > ABC light trap with light only. Significant differences in numbers collected among trapes were noted for several species including: Aedes vexans (Meigen), Anopheles lesteri Baisas and Hu. An. sinensis Weidemann, An. sineroides Yamada, An. yatsushiroensis Miyazaki. Culex pipiens pallets Coquillett L., Cx. orientalis Edwards and Cx. tritaeniorhynchus. Host-seeking activity for most common species showed a similar bimodal pattern. Results from these field trap evaluations can significantly enhance current vector and disease surveillance efforts especially for the primary vector of Japanese encephalitis, Cx. tritaeniorhunchus.

• Parasites, Hosts and Diseases
• /
• v.43 no.3 s.135
• /
• pp.75-92
• /
• 2005

Extensive previous studies on taxonomy, behavior/bionomics and control of Anopheles sinensis are reviewed and summarized. Recent molecular identification revealed that the population of An. sinensis complex includes An. sinensis, An. pullus, An. lesteri and at least two new species, and An. yatsushiroensis is synonmy of An. pullus. An. sinensis is the main vector specie of vivax malaria in Korea. Larvae of An. sinensis breed in wide range of habitats which are naturally-made clean water, stagnant or flowing; main habitats include rice fields, ditches, streams, irrigation cannals, marshes, ponds, ground pools, etc. Their host preferences are highly zoophilic. Human blood rate is very low ($0.7-1.7\%$); nevertheless An. sinensis readily feeds on man when domestic animals are not found near by. They feed on hosts throughout the night from dusk to dawn with a peak period of 02:00-04:00 hours; they are slightly more exophagic (biting outdoors); much larger numbers come into the room when light is on. Main resting places are outdoors such as grasses, vegetable fields and rice fields. A mark-release-recapture study resulted that $37.1\%$ was recaptured within 1 km, $29.4\%$ at 1-3 km, $21.1\%$ at 3-6 km, $10.3\%$ at 6-9 km and $2.1\%$ at 9-12 km distance. An. sinensis hibernate outdoors (mostly under part of dense grasses) during October-March. At the end of the hibernation period (March-April) they feed on cows at daytime. Until today any single measure to effectively control An. sinensis population has not been found. Indoor residual spray with a long-lasting insecticide can not reduce vector population densities, but shorten their life spans in some degree, so contributes to malaria control.

• Journal of information and communication convergence engineering
• /
• v.21 no.2
• /
• pp.159-166
• /
• 2023

The COI gene is a sequence of approximately 650 bp at the 5' terminal of the mitochondrial Cytochrome c Oxidase subunit I (COI) gene. As an effective DeoxyriboNucleic Acid (DNA) barcode, it is widely used for the taxonomic identification and evolutionary analysis of species. We created a CNN-LSTM hybrid model by combining the gene features partially extracted by the Long Short-Term Memory ( LSTM ) network with the feature maps obtained by the CNN. Compared to K-Means Clustering, Support Vector Machines (SVM), and a single CNN classification model, after training 278 samples in a training set that included 15 genera from two orders, the CNN-LSTM hybrid model achieved 94% accuracy in the test set, which contained 118 samples. We augmented the training set samples and four genera into four orders, and the classification accuracy of the test set reached 100%. This study also proposes calculating the cosine similarity between the training and test sets to initially assess the reliability of the predicted results and discover new species.

• The Korean Journal of Zoology
• /
• v.36 no.3
• /
• pp.408-415
• /
• 1993

Studies on seasonal prevalence and geographical distribution of chigger mites were carried out during the period of August 1990-December 1991, and the results are summarized as follows. From total 325 field rodents collected during the study period, 15,679 chiggers were obtained and 12 species of 4 genera were identified. Leptotrombidium pallidum, a vector species of tsutsugamushi disease in Korea was the predominant species and distributed throughout the country except southern part of Korea, whereas L. scutellare, known also as a vector species was distributed mainly in southern part of Korea. The distribution of chigger mites was strongly localized by species, showing different predominant species at each locality during the same season. The predominant species were L. pallidum(92.3%) at Dorai-5ri, Wondang-ub, Neotrombicula kwangneungensis (44.7%) at Sanjung-ri, Pochun-gun, N. tamiyai (55.1%) at Changgok-ri, Paju-gun, L. orientale (55.2%) at Jangsin-ri, Iksan-gun, and L. scutellare (47.6%) at Sinyong-dong, Iri-si. Study on seasonal prevalence of L. pallidum chiggers resulted that they started appearing in September, showed the peak in November, almost disappeared during the period of December-March, reappeared in April-May showing a small peak, and again almost disappeared until September. L. scutellare showed the peak in October, sharply decreased thereafter, and disappeared during the period of January-September.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
• /
• v.15 no.10
• /
• pp.3708-3728
• /
• 2021

Indian herbal plants are used in agriculture and in the food, cosmetics, and pharmaceutical industries. Laboratory-based tests are routinely used to identify and classify similar herb species by analyzing their internal cell structures. In this paper, we have applied computer vision techniques to do the same. The original leaf image was preprocessed using the Chan-Vese active contour segmentation algorithm to efface the background from the image by setting the contraction bias as (v) -1 and smoothing factor (µ) as 0.5, and bringing the initial contour close to the image boundary. Thereafter the segmented grayscale image was fed to a leaky capacitance fired neuron model (LCFN), which differentiates between similar herbs by combining different groups of pixels in the leaf image. The LFCN's decay constant (f), decay constant (g) and threshold (h) parameters were empirically assigned as 0.7, 0.6 and h=18 to generate the 1D feature vector. The LCFN time sequence identified the internal leaf structure at different iterations. Our proposed framework was tested against newly collected herbal species of natural images, geometrically variant images in terms of size, orientation and position. The 1D sequence and shape features of aloe, betel, Indian borage, bittergourd, grape, insulin herb, guava, mango, nilavembu, nithiyakalyani, sweet basil and pomegranate were fed into the 5-fold Bayesian regularization neural network (BRNN), K-nearest neighbors (KNN), support vector machine (SVM), and ensemble classifier to obtain the highest classification accuracy of 91.19%.

• Korean Journal of Microbiology
• /
• v.51 no.4
• /
• pp.338-346
• /
• 2015

The present work was undertaken to address the role of protein disulfide isomerase 2 (Pdi2) in the mercury-tolerance of Schizosaccharomyces pombe, using the Pdi2-overexpressing recombinant plasmid pYPDI2 and the corresponding vector plasmid pRS316. When exposed to mercuric chloride, the PDI2 overepxression cells grew significantly better than the vector control cells. They revealed the lower levels of intracellular reactive oxygen species (ROS) and nitric oxide (NO), when incubated with mercuric chloride for 6 h, than the vector control cells. The PDI2 overepxression cells contained the higher levels of total glutathione (GSH) and superoxide dismutase (SOD) activity than the vector control cells, after 6 h of incubation in mercuric chloride. However, the PDI2 overepxression cells contained similar levels of glutathione peroxidase (GPx) activities, compared to those of the vector control cells. Taken together, the S. pombe Pdi2 promotes the tolerance against mercury toxicity through up-regulating total GSH and SOD and subsequently attenuating ROS and NO elevations.

• Korean Journal of Microbiology
• /
• v.51 no.4
• /
• pp.319-328
• /
• 2015

The $sdu1^+$ gene encodes Sdu1, a PPPDE superfamily member of deubiquitinating enzymes (DUBs) in Schizosaccharomyces pombe. Sdu1 was previously shown to contain an actual ubiquitin C-terminal hydrolase (UCH) activity using the recombinant plasmid pYSTP which harbors the $sdu1^+$ gene. This work was designed to assess a thermotolerant role of Sdu1 against high incubation temperatures. In the temperature-shift experiments, the S. pombe cells harboring pYSTP grew much better after the shifts to $37^{\circ}C$ and $42^{\circ}C$, when compared with the vector control cells. After being shifted to $37^{\circ}C$ and $42^{\circ}C$ for 6 h, the S. pombe cells harboring pYSTP contained lower reactive oxygen species (ROS) levels, compared with the vector control cells. The nitric oxide (NO) levels of the S. pombe cells harboring pYSTP were slightly lower than those of the vector control cells in the absence or presence of the temperature shifting. The total glutathione (GSH) levels of the S. pombe cells harboring pYSTP were significantly higher than those of the vector control cells. Total superoxide dismutase (SOD) and GSH peroxidase activities were also higher in the S. pombe cells harboring pYSTP after the temperature shifts than in the vector control cells. In brief, the S. pombe Sdu1 plays a thermotolerant role against high incubation temperature through the down-regulation of ROS and NO and the up-regulation of total GSH content, total SOD and GSH peroxidase activities.

• Korean Journal of Microbiology
• /
• v.52 no.4
• /
• pp.398-405
• /
• 2016

The Schizosaccharomyces pombe structural gene encoding bacterioferritin comigratory protein (BCP) was previously cloned using the shuttle vector pRS316 to generate the BCP-overexpressing plasmid pBCP10. The present work aimed to evaluate the thermoresistant properties of BCP against high temperature stress using the plasmid pBCP10. When the S. pombe cells were grown to the early exponential phase and shifted from $30^{\circ}C$ to $37^{\circ}C$ or $42^{\circ}C$, the S. pombe cells harboring pBCP10 grew significantly more at both $37^{\circ}C$ and $42^{\circ}C$ than the vector control cells. After 6 h of the shifting to higher incubation temperatures, they contained the lower reactive oxygen species (ROS) and nitrite content, an index of nitric oxide (NO), than the vector control cells. After the temperature shifts, total glutathione (GSH) content and total superoxide dismutase (SOD) activities were much higher in the S. pombe cells harboring pBCP10 than in the corresponding vector control cells. Taken together, the S. pombe BCP plays a thermoresistant role which might be based upon its ability both to down-regulate ROS and NO levels and to up-regulate antioxidant components, such as total GSH and SOD, and subsequently to maintain thermal stability.

• Parasites, Hosts and Diseases
• /
• v.27 no.2
• /
• pp.141-144
• /
• 1989

During October-December 1987, chigger mites infested on the striped field mice (Apodemus agrarius cereae) collected at Pochun-gun, Gyeonggi Province and Chinhae city, Kyongnam Province were identified. . 1. Of 171 back-striped mice collected, chigger mites wire found from 58 mice, showing 33.9% of infestation rate. 2. Total 865 chigger mites collected were classified into seven species; Leptotrombidium pallidum (4.3%), L. palpate(23.0%), L. orienpalis(20.2%), L. xetum(19.0%), Neotrombicula tamiyai(32.9%), JV. japonica(0.25%) and Euschongastia koreaensis(0.3%). Though the most dominant species in number was N. tamiyai(32.9% of the total), this species was collected at very limited locality and for a short period. Therefore, most common species in Korea seems to be L. palpale which was found at all localities throughout the whole survey period. L. pallidum which is known as the vector species of tsutsugamushi disease in Korea was collected in a very low number(4.3% of the total chiggers collected). 3. The number of chigger mites infested on a host animal showed great variations from one chigger up to 207 chiggers. The present study has shown that there may be other Leptotrombidium species mite(s) for the vector and host of tsutsugamushi disease in Korea.