• Journal of Microbiology
• /
• v.40 no.4
• /
• pp.340-343
• /
• 2002

A PCB degrader, Ralstonia eutropha H850 was shown to induce bphC gene encoding 2,3-dihydroxy-biphenyl-1,2-dioxygenase in a carvone-amended pure culture in our previous study (Park et al.,1999). The present study was carried out to examine how plant terpenes, as natural substrates, would cause an expression of a PCB degradative gene in soil that was amended with terpenes. The population of Ralstonia eutropha H850 was maintained at least around 10$\^$8/ (CFU/g fresh soil) in the soil amended with carvone or limonene in the presence of succinate as a growth substrate at 50 th day. The gene expression was monitored by RT-PCR using total RNA directly extracted from each soil and bphC gene primers. The bphC gene expression of the seeded strain H850 was observed in the soil amended with biphenyl (4 days) but not with succinate, carvone and limonene. These results indicate that terpenes widely distributed in nature could be a potential inducing substrate for effective PCB biodegration in the soil but their bioavailability and specific induction behavior should be taken into account before PCB bioremediation implementation.

• Journal of Microbiology and Biotechnology
• /
• v.15 no.5
• /
• pp.1120-1124
• /
• 2005

Pseudomonas putida KCTC 1639 was newly identified as a potential producer of biodegradable medium chain length polyhydroxyalkanoates. It exhibited a carbon assimilation pattern quite different from other known P. putida strains, but a more similar pattern with P. oleovorans, which assimilates the carbon sources mainly through ${\beta}$-oxidation rather than the fatty acid biosynthesis pathway. The PHA synthesis gene cluster from P. putida KCTC1639 was composed of two gene loci; the PHA synthase gene locus and granule-associated gene locus, which were cloned and deposited in the GenBank under accession numbers AY286491 and AY750858 as a new nucleotide sequence, respectively. The molecular structure and amino acid homology of the new gene cluster were compared with those from Pseudomonas species, including other P. putida strains and P. oleovorans, and a higher than $90\%$ homology was observed.

• Journal of Pharmaceutical Investigation
• /
• v.32 no.3
• /
• pp.153-159
• /
• 2002

Gene therapy is fundamentally a sophisticated drug delivery technology to cure a disease by the transfer of genetic material to modify living cells. In other words, the gene is used as a therapeutic drug much like a chemical compound is employed in chemotherapy. Currently almost 600 clinical trials are underway worldwide since the first clinical trials carried out in 1990 to treat adenosine deaminase deficiency using retroviral vectors. Despite the great progress still is there no gene therapy product being approved as a new drug. This is partly due to a lack of an ideal gene delivery system that is safe and can provide stable, optimal level production of the therapeutic proteins in the cell. This review covers the current status of several different biological and physico-chemical agents that are being developed as gene delivery vehicles. Although gene therapy promises great hopes toward the cure of a broad spectrum of genetic and acquired diseases, the success of gene therapy heavily asks for the development of vector systems for safe and efficient application in humans.

• BMB Reports
• /
• v.57 no.1
• /
• pp.2-11
• /
• 2024

Advancements in gene and cell therapy have resulted in novel therapeutics for diseases previously considered incurable or challenging to treat. Among the various contributing technologies, genome editing stands out as one of the most crucial for the progress in gene and cell therapy. The discovery of CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) and the subsequent evolution of genetic engineering technology have markedly expanded the field of target-specific gene editing. Originally studied in the immune systems of bacteria and archaea, the CRISPR system has demonstrated wide applicability to effective genome editing of various biological systems including human cells. The development of CRISPR-based base editing has enabled directional cytosine-to-thymine and adenine-to-guanine substitutions of select DNA bases at the target locus. Subsequent advances in prime editing further elevated the flexibility of the edit multiple consecutive bases to desired sequences. The recent CRISPR technologies also have been actively utilized for the development of in vivo and ex vivo gene and cell therapies. We anticipate that the medical applications of CRISPR will rapidly progress to provide unprecedented possibilities to develop novel therapeutics towards various diseases.

• Journal of Plant Biotechnology
• /
• v.3 no.1
• /
• pp.13-17
• /
• 2001

A Chromium (VI)[Cr(VI)] reductase gene from heavy metal reducing bacteria Pseudomonas aeruginosa HP014 was used to transform tobacco plant cells. A chimeric construct containing the Cr(VI) reductase gene was transfered to tobacco leaf disks using an Agrobacteriun tumefaciens binary vector system. From the leaf disks, transformed plantlets were regenerated. Hybridization experiments demonstrated that the Cr(VI) reductase gene was inserted into and expressed in the regenerated plants. The Cr(VI) reduction activity showed that the transgenic plants may be a another possible tool to reduce the pollution of the toxic Cr(VI) in soil.

• Journal of Microbiology and Biotechnology
• /
• v.1 no.4
• /
• pp.251-255
• /
• 1991

A 16 kilobase (kb) HindIII fragment of alkalophilic Bacillus sp. YC-335 containing a gene for xylanase synthesis was inserted at the HindIII site of pBR322 and cloned in Escherichia coli HB101. After subcloning of recombinant plasmid pYS52, the 1.5 kb fragment was found to code for xylanase activity, and the hybrid plasmid was named pYS55. The DNA insert of the plasmid was subjected to restriction enzyme mapping, which showed that pYS55 had single site for PuvII and SstI in the 1.5 kb insert fragment. Southern hybridization analysis revealed that the cloned gene was hybridized with chromosomal DNA from alkalophilic Bacillus sp. YC-335. About 64% of the enzyme activity was observed in the extracellular and periplasmic space of E. coli HB10l carrying pYS55.

• Journal of Microbiology and Biotechnology
• /
• v.1 no.4
• /
• pp.266-273
• /
• 1991

Hirudin, a 65-amino acid protein isolated from the salivary gland of the bloodsucking leech, Hirudo medicinalis, is a potent thrombin-specific inhibitor and blocks the thrombin-mediated conversion of fibrinogen to fibrin in clot formation. We have studied the gene expression and secretion of hirudin in yeast. Saccharomyces cerevisiae. A gene coding for hirudin was synthesized based on the amino acid sequence and cloned into a yeast expression vector $YEG{\alpha}-1$ containing the ${\alpha}-mating$ factor pre-pro leader sequence and galactose-inducible promoter, GALl0. Recombinant S. cerevisiae was found to secrete biologically active hirudin into the extracellular medium. The secreted recombinant hirudin was recovered from the culture medium and purified with ultrafiltration and reverse phase high performance liquid chromatography. Approximately 1 mg of hirudin per liter was produced under suboptimal culture conditions and brought to about 90% purity in two steps of purification.

• Journal of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry
• /
• v.67
• /
• pp.284-292
• /
• 2018

Receptor for advanced glycation end-products (RAGE) is overexpressed in various cancer cells. In this study, a RAGE-binding peptide (RBP) was conjugated to polyethylenimine (25 kDa, PEI). RBP-conjugated PEI (PEI-RBP) was characterized as a dual-functional reagent, a RAGE-mediated gene carrier and an anti-angiogenic reagent. As a gene carrier, PEI-RBP had higher transfection efficiency to the C6 glioblastoma cells than PEI. As an anti-angiogenic reagent, the pEmpty/PEI-RBP complex reduced RAGE expression on the surface of the C6 glioblastoma cells. Also, the complex reduced the VEGF expression and tube formation of endothelial cells. Therefore, PEI-RBP may be useful for development of glioblastoma therapy.

• KSBB Journal
• /
• v.31 no.1
• /
• pp.27-32
• /
• 2016

Several CoA transferases from Clostridium beijerinckii, C. perfringens and Klebsiella pneumoniae were examined for biosynthesis of lactate-containing polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs) in recombinant Escherichia coli XL1-Blue strain. The CB3819 gene and the CB4543 gene from C. beijerinckii, the pct gene from C. perfringens and the pct gene from K. pneumoniae, which encodes putative CoA transferase gene, respectively, was co-expressed with the Pseudomonas sp. MBEL 6-19 phaC1437 gene encoding engineered Pseudomonas sp. MBEL 6-19 PHA synthase 1 ($PhaC1_{Ps6-19}$) to examine its activity for the construction of key metabolic pathway to produce poly(3-hydroxybutyrate-co-lactate) [P(3HB-co-LA)]. The recombinant E. coli XL1-Blue expressing the phaC1437 gene and CB3819 gene synthesized poly(3-hydroxybutyrate) [P(3HB)] homopolymer to the P(3HB) content of 60.5 wt% when it was cultured in a chemically defined medium containing 20 g/L of glucose and 2 g/L of sodium 3-hydroxybutyrate. Expression of the phaC1437 gene and CB4543 gene in recombinant E. coli XL1-Blue also produced P(3HB) homopolymer to the P(3HB) content of 51.2 wt% in the same culture condition. Expression of the phaC1437 gene and the K. pneumoniae pct gene in recombinant E. coli XL1-Blue could not result in the production of PHAs in the same culture condition. However, the recombinant E. coli XL1-Blue expressing the phaC1437 gene and the C. perfringens gene could produce poly(3-hydroxybutyrate-co-lactate [P(86.4mol%3HB-co-13.7 mol%LA) up to the PHA content of 10.6 wt% in the same culture condition. Newly examined CoA transfereases in this study may be useful for the construction of engineered E. coli strains to produce PHA containing novel monomer such lactate.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
• /
• v.3 no.1
• /
• pp.38-42
• /
• 2007

Microarray data includes tens of thousands of gene expressions simultaneously, so it can be effectively used in identifying the phenotypes of diseases. However, the retrieval of functional information from a large corpus of gene expression data is still a time-consuming task. In this paper, we propose an efficient method for identifying functional categories of differentially expressed genes from a micro-array experiment by using Gene Ontology (GO). Our method is as follows: (1) The expression data set is first filtered to include only genes with mean expression values that differ by at least 3-fold between the two groups. (2) The genes are then ranked based on the t-statistics. The 100 most highly ranked genes are selected as informative genes. (3) The t-value of each informative gene is imposed as a score on the associated GO terms. High-scoring GO terms are then listed with their associated genes and represent the functional category information of the micro-array experiment. A system called HMDA (Hallym Micro-array Data analysis) is implemented on publicly available micro-array data sets and validated. Our results were also compared with the original analysis.