• Genomics & Informatics
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• 제12권4호
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• pp.268-275
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• 2014

The harshness of legionellosis differs from mild Pontiac fever to potentially fatal Legionnaire's disease. The increasing development of drug resistance against legionellosis has led to explore new novel drug targets. It has been found that phosphoglucosamine mutase, phosphomannomutase, and phosphoglyceromutase enzymes can be used as the most probable therapeutic drug targets through extensive data mining. Phosphoglucosamine mutase is involved in amino sugar and nucleotide sugar metabolism. The purpose of this study was to predict the potential target of that specific drug. For this, the 3D structure of phosphoglucosamine mutase of Legionella pneumophila (strain Paris) was determined by means of homology modeling through Phyre2 and refined by ModRefiner. Then, the designed model was evaluated with a structure validation program, for instance, PROCHECK, ERRAT, Verify3D, and QMEAN, for further structural analysis. Secondary structural features were determined through self-optimized prediction method with alignment (SOPMA) and interacting networks by STRING. Consequently, we performed molecular docking studies. The analytical result of PROCHECK showed that 95.0% of the residues are in the most favored region, 4.50% are in the additional allowed region and 0.50% are in the generously allowed region of the Ramachandran plot. Verify3D graph value indicates a score of 0.71 and 89.791, 1.11 for ERRAT and QMEAN respectively. Arg419, Thr414, Ser412, and Thr9 were found to dock the substrate for the most favorable binding of S-mercaptocysteine. However, these findings from this current study will pave the way for further extensive investigation of this enzyme in wet lab experiments and in that way assist drug design against legionellosis.

• Journal of Microbiology and Biotechnology
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• 제29권6호
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• pp.962-972
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• 2019

Non-typhoidal Salmonella (NTS) is one of the most frequent causes of bacterial foodborne illnesses. Considering that the main reservoir of NTS is the intestinal tract of livestock, foods of animal origin are regarded as the main vehicles of Salmonella infection. In particular, poultry colonized with Salmonella Typhimurium (S. Typhimurium), a dominant serotype responsible for human infections, do not exhibit overt signs and symptoms, thereby posing a potential health risk to humans. In this study, comparative genomics approaches were applied to two S. Typhimurium strains, ST1539 and ST1120, isolated from a duck slaughterhouse and a pig farm, respectively, to characterize their virulence and antimicrobial resistance-associated genomic determinants. ST1539 containing a chromosome (4,905,039 bp; 4,403 CDSs) and a plasmid (93,876 bp; 96 CDSs) was phylogenetically distinct from other S. Typhimurium strains such as ST1120 and LT2. Compared to the ST1120 genome (previously deposited in GenBank; CP021909.1 and CP021910.1), ST1539 possesses more virulence determinants, including ST64B prophage, plasmid spv operon encoding virulence factors, genes encoding SseJ effector, Rck invasin, and biofilm-forming factors (bcf operon and pefAB). In accordance with the in silico prediction, ST1539 exhibited higher cytotoxicity against epithelial cells, better survival inside macrophage cells, and faster mice-killing activity than ST1120. However, ST1539 showed less resistance against antibiotics than ST1120, which may be attributed to the multiple resistanceassociated genes in the ST1120 chromosome. The accumulation of comparative genomics data on S. Typhimurium isolates from livestock would enrich our understanding of strategies Salmonella employs to adapt to diverse host animals.

• Genomics & Informatics
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• 제21권1호
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• pp.3.1-3.10
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• 2023

Characterization as well as prediction of the secondary and tertiary structure of hypothetical proteins from their amino acid sequences uploaded in databases by in silico approach are the critical issues in computational biology. Severe acute respiratory syndrome-associated coronavirus (SARS-CoV), which is responsible for pneumonia alike diseases, possesses a wide range of proteins of which many are still uncharacterized. The current study was conducted to reveal the physicochemical characteristics and structures of an uncharacterized protein Q6S8D9_SARS of SARS-CoV. Following the common flowchart of characterizing a hypothetical protein, several sophisticated computerized tools e.g., ExPASy Protparam, CD Search, SOPMA, PSIPRED, HHpred, etc. were employed to discover the functions and structures of Q6S8D9_SARS. After delineating the secondary and tertiary structures of the protein, some quality evaluating tools e.g., PROCHECK, ProSA-web etc. were performed to assess the structures and later the active site was identified also by CASTp v.3.0. The protein contains more negatively charged residues than positively charged residues and a high aliphatic index value which make the protein more stable. The 2D and 3D structures modeled by several bioinformatics tools ensured that the proteins had domain in it which indicated it was functional protein having the ability to trouble host antiviral inflammatory cytokine and interferon production pathways. Moreover, active site was found in the protein where ligand could bind. The study was aimed to unveil the features and structures of an uncharacterized protein of SARS-CoV which can be a therapeutic target for development of vaccines against the virus. Further research are needed to accomplish the task.

• 한국자원식물학회:학술대회논문집
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• 한국자원식물학회 2018년도 춘계학술발표회
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• pp.95-95
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• 2018

Uric acid is the end product of purine metabolism in human body, originating from hypoxanthine after enzyme catalysis by Xanthine oxidase (XOD). Hyperuricemia results as a result of either over-generation of uric acid or a reduction in its excretion. In silico modelling methods such as Absorption, Distribution, Metabolism, Excretion and Toxicity (ADMET) prediction, Autodock 4.2.6 program were used to study the potential inhibitory compounds of XOD. Also we investigated the inhibition of XOD activity by using the extracts of Dendropanax morbifera and Rubus coreanus Miq spectrophotometrically. According to ADMET data, several compounds from D. morbifera and R. coreanus plants, were found to be more potent in inhibiting the XOD activity than allopurinol. XOD inhibitory activity is evaluated by quantifying the formation of uric acid by measuring the absorbance at 290 m ($A_{290}$).D. morbifera extract inhibited XOD activity at $250{\mu}g/ml$, however the extracts from R. coreanus has inhibited XOD activity at $25{\mu}g/ml$. The major compound of R. coreanus, ellagic acid significantly increased the inhibition rate from $9{\mu}g/ml$ and showed a 71% suppression rate at $15{\mu}g/ml$. Finally, these results suggested a potential inhibitory activities of the extracts from D. morbifera and R. coreanus Miq, but further research is needed to validate to ensure their safe usage as drug.

• Genomics & Informatics
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• 제13권2호
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• pp.53-59
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• 2015

In developing countries threat of cholera is a significant health concern whenever water purification and sewage disposal systems are inadequate. Vibrio cholerae is one of the responsible bacteria involved in cholera disease. The complete genome sequence of V. cholerae deciphers the presence of various genes and hypothetical proteins whose function are not yet understood. Hence analyzing and annotating the structure and function of hypothetical proteins is important for understanding the V. cholerae. V. cholerae O139 is the most common and pathogenic bacterial strain among various V. cholerae strains. In this study sequence of six hypothetical proteins of V. cholerae O139 has been annotated from NCBI. Various computational tools and databases have been used to determine domain family, protein-protein interaction, solubility of protein, ligand binding sites etc. The three dimensional structure of two proteins were modeled and their ligand binding sites were identified. We have found domains and families of only one protein. The analysis revealed that these proteins might have antibiotic resistance activity, DNA breaking-rejoining activity, integrase enzyme activity, restriction endonuclease, etc. Structural prediction of these proteins and detection of binding sites from this study would indicate a potential target aiding docking studies for therapeutic designing against cholera.

• International Journal of Advanced Culture Technology
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• 제6권4호
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• pp.275-283
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• 2018

Cancer show distinct pattern of gene expression when it is compared to normal. This difference results malignant characteristic of cancer. Many cancer drugs are targeting this difference so that it can selectively kill cancer cells. One of the recent demand for personalized treating cancer is retrieving normal tissue from a patient so that the gene expression difference between cancer and normal be assessed. However, in most clinical situation it is hard to retrieve normal tissue from a patient. This is because biopsy of normal tissues may cause damage to the organ function or a risk of infection or side effect what a patient to take. Thus, there is a challenge to estimate normal cell's gene expression where cancers are originated from without taking additional biopsy. In this paper, we propose in-silico based prediction of normal cell's gene expression from gene expression data of a tumor sample. We call this challenge as reverting the cancer into normal. We divided this challenge into two parts. The first part is making a generator that is able to fool a pretrained discriminator. Pretrained discriminator is from the training of public data (9,601 cancers, 7,240 normals) which shows 0.997 of accuracy to discriminate if a given gene expression pattern is cancer or normal. Deceiving this pretrained discriminator means our method is capable of generating very normal-like gene expression data. The second part of the challenge is to address whether generated normal is similar to true reverse form of the input cancer data. We used, cycle-consistent adversarial networks to approach our challenges, since this network is capable of translating one domain to the other while maintaining original domain's feature and at the same time adding the new domain's feature. We evaluated that, if we put cancer data into a cycle-consistent adversarial network, it could retain most of the information from the input (cancer) and at the same time change the data into normal. We also evaluated if this generated gene expression of normal tissue would be the biological reverse form of the gene expression of cancer used as an input.

• Composites Research
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• 제37권2호
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• pp.132-138
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• 2024

본 연구에서는 분자동역학 전산모사를 통해 육방정계 단일벽 질화붕소 나노튜브(BNNT)의 반경 변화에 따른 압전탄성 변화를 규명하였다. 질화붕소의 거동을 비교적 잘 모사하는 Tersoff 포텐셜과 기계적 하중인가에 따른 질소 및 붕소원자의 상대변위로 인한 분극의 정량화를 위해 강체 이온 근사를 채택하였다. 선형 압전탄성 구성방정식을 기반으로 각각의 질화붕소에 변형률을 인가하고 이에 따른 전기적 변위와 응력을 산출하여 압전상수와 영률을 각각 예측하였다. 그 결과, BNNT의 압전상수는 반경이 증가함에 따라 점진적으로 감소하는 양상을 보였다. 반면 탄성계수의 경우 불연속적 구조를 가지는 질화붕소를 등가의 연속체 구조로 등가시키는 방법에 따라 증가 또는 감소하는 경향을 보였다. BNNT의 곡률변화에 따른 물성변화를 가상실험에 기반한 경험적 모델로 근사하기 위해 BNNT의 튜브반경-압전탄성물성 간 상관관계식을 제안하였다. 또한 BNNT의 반경변화에 따른 물성을 곡률의 관점에서 설명하기 위해, BNNT와 질화붕소 나노시트(BNNS)의 결합에너지와 탄성변형에 따른 원자간 결합길이 변화가 각각의 구조의 변형에너지 증가에 기여하는 정도를 상호 비교하였다.

• Genomics & Informatics
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• 제16권4호
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• pp.26.1-26.12
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• 2018

Shigella spp. constitutes some of the key pathogens responsible for the global burden of diarrhoeal disease. With over 164 million reported cases per annum, shigellosis accounts for 1.1 million deaths each year. Majority of these cases occur among the children of the developing nations and the emergence of multi-drug resistance Shigella strains in clinical isolates demands the development of better/new drugs against this pathogen. The genome of Shigella flexneri was extensively analyzed and found 4,362 proteins among which the functions of 674 proteins, termed as hypothetical proteins (HPs) had not been previously elucidated. Amino acid sequences of all these 674 HPs were studied and the functions of a total of 39 HPs have been assigned with high level of confidence. Here we have utilized a combination of the latest versions of databases to assign the precise function of HPs for which no experimental information is available. These HPs were found to belong to various classes of proteins such as enzymes, binding proteins, signal transducers, lipoprotein, transporters, virulence and other proteins. Evaluation of the performance of the various computational tools conducted using receiver operating characteristic curve analysis and a resoundingly high average accuracy of 93.6% were obtained. Our comprehensive analysis will help to gain greater understanding for the development of many novel potential therapeutic interventions to defeat Shigella infection.

• 생명과학회지
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• 제27권10호
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• pp.1215-1224
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• 2017

현재까지 다양한 암의 발병 원인이 밝혀졌는데, 그 중 하나로써 DNA에 돌연변이가 축적되어 유전체가 불안정 해짐에 따라 암이 발생될 수 있는 기작들이 주목받고 있다. 생물정보학과 유전체학의 발달에 따라 질병 연구에 있어서 보다 더 정확하고 신뢰성 있는 바이오마커를 찾는 것이 가능해졌다. 따라서, 생물정보학과 유전체학의 연구 기반을 바탕으로 한 암의 바이오마커는 암의 조기진단뿐만 아니라, 더 나아가 암 발생 예측과 암환자의 예후 진단에 적용될 수 있다. 최근 들어 인간 유전체에서 약 45%를 차지하는 이동성 유전인자(transposable elements, TEs)가 유전자의 발현 조절과 DNA의 돌연변이를 유도함으로써 다양한 질병에 영향을 미친다는 사실이 밝혀짐에 따라, 이러한 이동성 유전인자들이 암의 발생과 어떤 연관이 있는지에 대한 연구 또한 활발히 진행되고 있다. 따라서 우리는 이동성 유전인자가 대장암과 어떤 연관성이 있는지에 대해 조사를 하였으며, 이를 어떻게 바이오마커로 활용할 수 있는지 알아보았다. 우선, 이동성 유전인자 중 인간 유전체에 많이 존재하면서 유전체에 많은 영향을 미치는 LINE-1 (long interspersed nuclear element-1, L1)과 Alu, LTR (long terminal repeat) 위주로 확인하였다. 흥미롭게도, 대장암 세포에서 LINE-1의 저메틸화, APC 유전자 내에 LINE-1 삽입, Alu의 저메틸화와 과메틸화, LTR 삽입에 따른 isoform 발생 등이 특징적으로 나타나는 것을 알 수 있었다. 또한 원발암유전자에서의 L1 저메틸화가 대장암 전이의 바이오마커로 쓰일 수 있다는 것과 Alu에 의한 MLH1 돌연변이가 가족성 및 유전성 대장암에서 흔히 발견된다는 것을 알 수 있었다. 이 때 이동성 유전인자에 의하여 영향 받는 유전자들의 발현을 in silico 발현 분석을 통하여 분석하였으며, 조직별, 성별 특이적 발현 양상을 제시하였다. 이들을 토대로 대장암 바이오마커를 개발하여 유전성 대장암의 예측 및 대장암 진단 또는 대장암 예후 예측을 통한 개인 맞춤형 치료에 활용할 수 있을 것으로 예상된다.

• 생명과학회지
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• 제25권11호
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• pp.1304-1310
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• 2015

주기성 시계 유전자 3(period circadian clock gene 3, PER3)는 포유류에서 생물학적 주기 타이밍 시스템의 역할을 수행 한다. 이 유전자는 규칙적인 운동 체계에 의해 근육에서 전사 개시 되는 것으로 알려져 있다. 인간과 마우스에서는 본 유전자에 대해 잘 알려져 있지만, 주기 및 연주기 동안 낮의 길이에 영향을 많이 받는 말에서 운동 연관 연구는 존재하지 않는다. 운동 시 근육의 기능에 중요한 역할을 하는 PER3 유전자에 대해 대표적인 경주마인 국내산 더러브렛 품종의 운동 전과 운동 후 유전자 발현을 분석하기 위해 본 연구를 수행하였다. 그 결과, 골격근에서 PER3 유전자의 발현은 운동 전에 비해 운동 후에 유의적으로 증가하는 것으로 나타났다. 또한, 인실리코상에서 4개의 비동의성 단일 염기 변이(non-synonymous single nucleotide polymorphism, nsSNP) 분석과 이러한 nsSNP의 단백질 구조 및 기능 분석 결과, 전체 자유 에너지와 RMSD 값은 돌연변이의 원인이 될 수 있음으로 나타났다. 이 중, nsSNP–s395916798 (G72R)은 구조적 기능적 측면에서 중요한 잔기의 안정화 효과와 연관된 것을 알 수 있었다. 본 연구는 운동에 따라 더러브렛 골격근 내 PER3 발현 차이는 운동이라는 표현형에 대표될 수 있음을 확인하였다. 또한, SNP의 조합을 활용하여 운동 후 경주마의 조기 회복의 평가 지표로써 유용한 바이오마커가 될 수 있음을 시사한다.