• Biomedical Science Letters
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.24-28
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• 2016

Tuberculosis (TB) remains an unsolved community health problem since identification of its causing microorganism called Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB) by Robert Koch in 1882. Annually, eight million TB cases are newly reported and 2~3 million patients die from TB. Pulmonary TB is highly infectious and untreated pulmonary TB patients are believed to infect >10 people in a year. The conventional methods for diagnosis of TB are chest X-ray and isolation of the causing microorganisms from patient specimens. Screening of TB is conducted with smeared sputum in slides, and TB is confirmed by identification of MTB in cultured specimens. One of the fatal pitfalls of screening detection for smeared sputum is that it is impossible to distinguish MTB and other acid-fast bacilli (AFB) because they are stained equally with Ziehl-Neelsen (ZN) stain. Culture of MTB is the most reliable method for diagnosis of TB but it takes 4~8 weeks. In this report, we suggest a fast and highly-reliable MTB detection method that distinguishes AFB in sputum samples. Purified DNA from the AFB stained slide samples offered by The Korean Institute of Tuberculosis were used to detect infected MTB in patients. PCR, real-time PCR and reverse blot hybridization assay (REBA) methods were applied to purified DNA. Conclusively, the real-time PCR method was confirmed to produce high sensitivity and we were able to further detect drug-resistant MTB with REBA.

• Journal of Korean Neurosurgical Society
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• v.60 no.3
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• pp.335-347
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• 2017

Intravenous recombinant tissue plasminogen activator had been the only approved treatment for acute ischemic stroke since its approval in 1995. However, the restrictive time window, numerous contraindications, and its low recanalization rate were all limitations of this modality. Under those circumstances, endovascular stroke therapy went through a great evolution during the past two decades of intravenous thrombolysis. The results of the 2013 randomized trials for endovascular stroke therapy were neutral, although they were limited by insufficient imaging screening at enrollment, early-generation devices with less efficacy, and treatment delays. Huge progress was made in 2015, as there were five randomized clinical trials which all demonstrated the safety and efficacy of endovascular stroke treatment. Despite differences in detail patient enrollment criteria, all 5 trials employed key factors for good functional recovery; (1) screening with non-invasive imaging to identify the proximal occlusion and exclude a large infarct core, (2) using highly effective modern thrombectomy devices mainly with stent retriever, and (3) establishment of a fast workflow to achieve effective reperfusion. The results of those trials indicate that modern thrombectomy devices can allow for faster and more effective reperfusion, which can lead to improved clinical outcomes compared to intravenous thrombolysis alone. These advances in mechanical thrombectomy are promising in the global fight against ischemic stroke-related disability and mortality. Two current mainstreams among such mechanical thrombectomy techniques, "stent retriever thrombectomy" and "direct clot aspiration", are the topic of this review. Stent retriever thrombectomy using Solitaire and Trevo retriever will be firstly discussed. And, the commonalities and the differences between two major clot aspiration thrombectomy techniques; a direct aspiration first pass technique (ADAPT) and forced arterial suction thrombectomy (FAST), will be additionally explained. Finally, details regarding the combination of direct clot aspiration and stent retriever thrombectomy, the switching strategy and the Solumbra technique, will be described.

• Korean Journal of Weed Science
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.81-88
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• 1993

For searching the photosynthetic electron transport(PET) inhibitors, bio-rational screening system using thylakoid membranes extracted from wild and mutant cyanobacteria(Anacystis nidulans $R_2$) was developed. Generally, thylakoid membrane was more sensitive to the tested herbicides than the chloroplast from spinach in the Hill reaction. Higher resistant characteristics appeared in mutant D-5, Di-22 to diuron and mutant G-264 to atrazine as compared to wild type. To test the reaction of thylakoid membrane to herbicides, diuron and atrazine were applied simultaneously. Diuron and atrazine competed each other for binding with substituted amino acids, while diuron and dinoseb were non-competitive, and inhibiting activity was increased. Conclusively, bio-rational screening system using cyanobacteria was proved to be fast and efficient screening method for the development of PET inhibitors.

• Mass Spectrometry Letters
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• v.6 no.4
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• pp.116-119
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• 2015

Globotriaosylsphingosine (lyso-Gb3) is considered as one of the biological marker for Fabry disease. To date, a reliable biomarker that reflects disease severity and progression has not been discovered to guide the management of Fabry disease. A new method included a simple protein precipitation with acetonitrile in 100 μL of plasma following analyte separation on an Phenomenex Kintex- C18 column using a gradient elution (0.1% formic acid in 5-90% acetonitrile). Total run time was within 12 min including sample preparation and MS/MS analysis. The limit of detection and limit of quantitation were 1 ng/mL and 2 ng/mL, respectively. The calibration curve was linear over the concentration range of 2.0-200.0 ng/mL (r² = 0.9999). Inter-day accuracy and precision at 7 level were 93.4-100.7% with RSD of 0.55-5.97%. Absolute recovery was 97.6-98.6%. The method was applied to human and mice plasma, proved the suitability for quantification of lyso-Gb3 for screening, diagnosis and therapeutic monitoring of Fabry disease patients.

• Journal of Astronomy and Space Sciences
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.1-10
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• 2003

A precise kinematic orbit determination (P-KOD) procedure for Low Earth Orbiter(LEO) using the GPS ion-free triple differenced carrier phases is presented. Because the triple differenced observables provide only relative information, the first epoch's positions of the orbit should be held fixed. Then, both forward and backward filtering was executed to mitigate the effect of biases of the first epoch's position. p-KOD utilizes the precise GPS orbits and ground stations data from International GPS Service (IGS) so that the only unknown parameters to be solved are positions of the satellite at each epoch. Currently, the 3-D accuracy off-KOD applied to CHAMP (CHAllenging Min-isatellite Payload) shows better than 35 cm compared to the published rapid scientific orbit (RSO) solution from GFZ (GeoForschungsZentrum Potsdam). The data screening for cycle slips is a particularly challenging procedure for LEO, which moves very fast in the middle of the ionospheric layer. It was found that data screening using SNR (signal to noise ratio) generates best results based on the residual analysis using RSO. It is expected that much better accuracy are achievable with refined prescreening procedure and optimized geometry of the satellites and ground stations.

• Korean Journal of Microbiology
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• v.38 no.2
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• pp.103-106
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• 2002

Direct PCR from intact fungal cells is not readily suitable to all fungi mainly because of difficulties in rupturing the cell walls. Microwave irradiation has been proven to be useful in fungal DNA extraction protocol. Here we describe a fast template preparation method for PCR amplification from Aspefillus nidulans conidiospores using microwave irradiation. We optimized the duration far microwave irradiation, and the amount of template DNA for PCR. Amplification from samples prepared in this manner was so efficient that we could get PCR products with size enough to identify transformants. We believe that this is a time-saving procedure for screening true transformants of A. nidulans.

• Korean Journal of Computational Design and Engineering
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• v.14 no.6
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• pp.404-414
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• 2009

In the computational molecular analysis, 3D structural comparison for protein searching plays a very important role. As protein databases have been grown rapidly in size, exhaustive search methods cannot provide satisfactory performance. Because exhaustive search methods try to handle the structure of protein by using sphere set which is converted from atoms set, the similarity calculation about two sphere sets is very expensive. Instead, the filter-and-refine paradigm offers an efficient alternative to database search without compromising the accuracy of the answers. In recent, a very fast algorithm based on the inter-atomic distance has been suggested by Ballester and Richard. Since they adopted the moments of distribution with inter-atomic distance between atoms which are rotational invariant, they can eliminate the structure alignment and orientation fix process and perform the searching faster than previous methods. In this paper, we propose a new 3D shape descriptor. It has properties of the general shape distribution and useful property in screening the molecular database. We show some experimental results for the validity of our method.

• Journal of Mechanical Science and Technology
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• v.19 no.12
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• pp.2197-2204
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• 2005

The combination of Gas chromatography (GC) for separation and Flame Ionization Detection (FID) for detection and identification of the components of a mixture of compounds is a fast and strongly proved method of analytic chemistry. The objective of this research was to design a combined High-speed miniature screening Gas chromatograph along with a Flame Ionization Detector for quick, quantitative and qualitative analysis of gas components. This combined GC-FID system is suitable to detect the volatile and semi-volatile hydrocarbons present in a gas mixture. The construction made it less expensive, easy to use and movable. The complete gas path was developed. On/off valves, temperature and flow sensors and their interface electronics were used for controlling purpose. A Microcontroller was programmed to measure the temperature and gas flow using the sensors and to control and regulate them using the electronics and valves. A pocket PC with its touch screen served as a user interface for the system. Software was developed for the pocket PC, which makes the communication possible with the Microcontroller. The system parameters can be indicated in the Pocket PC as simple text and also the analysis result can be displayed.

• Molecules and Cells
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• v.44 no.11
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• pp.843-850
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• 2021

The rapid increase in collateral omics and phenotypic data has enabled data-driven studies for the fast discovery of cancer targets and biomarkers. Thus, it is necessary to develop convenient tools for general oncologists and cancer scientists to carry out customized data mining without computational expertise. For this purpose, we developed innovative software that enables user-driven analyses assisted by knowledge-based smart systems. Publicly available data on mutations, gene expression, patient survival, immune score, drug screening and RNAi screening were integrated from the TCGA, GDSC, CCLE, NCI, and DepMap databases. The optimal selection of samples and other filtering options were guided by the smart function of the software for data mining and visualization on Kaplan-Meier plots, box plots and scatter plots of publication quality. We implemented unique algorithms for both data mining and visualization, thus simplifying and accelerating user-driven discovery activities on large multiomics datasets. The present Q-omics software program (v0.95) is available at http://qomics.sookmyung.ac.kr.

• Journal of Microbiology and Biotechnology
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• v.29 no.7
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• pp.1117-1123
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• 2019

Control of pine wilt disease, which is caused by pine wilt nematode Bursaphelenchus xylophilus, is heavily dependent on the use of chemicals such as abamectin. Although such chemicals are highly effective, demands for alternatives that are derived preferentially from natural sources, are increasing out of environmental concerns. One of the challenges to discovery of alternative control agents is lack of fast and efficient screening method that can be used in a high-throughput manner. Here we described the development of colorimetric assay for the rapid and accurate screening of candidate nematicidal compounds/biologics targeting B. xylophilus. Contrary to the conventional method, which relies on laborious visual inspection and counting of nematode population under microscope, our method utilizes a redox dye that changes its color in response to metabolic activity of nematode population in a given sample. In this work, we optimized parameters of our colorimetric assay including number of nematodes and amount of redox dye, and tested applicability of our assay for screening of chemicals and biologics. We demonstrated that our colorimetric assay can be applied to rapid and accurate quantification of nematode viability/mortality in a nematode population treated with candidate chemicals/biologics. Application of our method would facilitate high-throughput endeavors aiming at finding environment-friendly control agents for deadly disease of pine trees.