• Journal of Microbiology and Biotechnology
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.337-345
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• 2005

The degradation of phenanthrene, a model PAH compound, by microorganisms either in the mixed culture or individual strain, isolated from oil-contaminated soil in oil refmery vicinity sites, was examined. The effects of pH, temperature, initial concentration of phenanthrene, and the addition of carbon sources on biodegradation potential were also investigated. Results showed that soil samples collected from four oil refinery sites in Korea had different degrees of PAH contamination and different indigenous phenanthrene-degrading microorganisms. The optimal conditions for phenanthrene biodegradation were determined to be 30$^{circ}C$ and pH 7.0. A significantly positive relationship was observed between the microbial growth and the rate of phenanthrene degradation. However, the phenanthrene biodegradation capability of the mixed culture was not related to the degree of PAH contamination in soil. In low phenanthrene concentration, the growth and biodegradation rates of the mixed cultures did not increase over those of the individual strain, especially IC10. High concentration of phenanthrene inhibited the growth of microbial strains and biodegradation of phenanthrene, but was less inhibitory on the mixed culture. Finally, when non-ionic surfactants such as Brij 30 and Brij 35 were present at the level above critical micelle concentrations (CMCs), phenanthrene degradation was completely inhibited and delayed by the addition of Triton X100 and Triton N101.

• Korean Journal of Human Ecology
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• v.20 no.6
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• pp.1121-1133
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• 2011

Fair trade has received increasing attention from ethical consumers in the North Trans-Atlantic world. It is a movement establishing alternative trading organizations to ensure minimal returns, safe working conditions, and to provide continuity in the trading relationship for disadvantaged producers, especially women and indigenous people in the South. Despite of the growing fair trade movement in the U.S. and Europe, it is still in the introductory stage in Korea. Although fair trade has gained some attention because of the efforts of activists, most Korean consumers are still unaware of it. This paper is divided into four sections including an introduction and conclusions. In section two, I analysed sales of the fairly traded products and the websites of the fairly traded products sellers. In section three, I proposed two effective recommendations for the better marketing and promotion strategies of fairly traded products. One proposal is for providing consumer information, like fair trade certificates, consumer campaigns, and consumer information of the fair trade sellers' websites analyses. The other is for establishing the infrastructure to promote the consumption of fairly traded products such as consumer education, corporate social responsibility, social enterprise, fair trade town and school, and networking. This study is relavant to academics, non-profit fair trade organizations, manufacturers, retailers and governments.

• Journal of Microbiology and Biotechnology
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.84-91
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• 2006

A Saccharomyces cerevisiae pgs1 nulI mutant, which is deficient with phosphatidyl glycerol (PG) and cardiolipin (CL) biosynthesis, grows well on most fermentable carbon sources, but fails to grow on non-fermentable carbon sources such as glycerol, ethanol, and lactate. This mutant also cannot grow on galactose medium as the sole carbon source. We found that the incorporation of $[^{14}C]-galactose$, which is the first step of the galactose metabolic pathway (Leloir pathway), into the pgs 1 null mutant cell was extremely repressed. Exogenously expressed PGS1 (YCpPGS1) under indigenous promoter could completely restore the pgs1 growth defect on non-fermentable carbon sources, and dramatically recovered $[^{14}C]-galactose$ incorporation into the pgs1 mutant cell. However, PGS1 expression under the GALl promoter $(YEpP_{GAL1}-PGS1myc)$ could not complement pgs1 mutation, and the GAL2-lacZ fusion gene $(YEpP_{GAL2}-lacZ)$ also did not exhibit its $\beta-galactosidase$ activity in the pgs1 mutant. In wild-type yeast, antimycin $A(1\;{\mu}g/ml)$, which inhibits mitochondrial complex III, severely repressed not only the expression of the GAL2-lacZ fusion gene, but also uptake of $[^{14}C]-galactose$. However, exogenously expressed PGS1 partially relieved these inhibitory effects of antimycin A in both the pgs1 mutant and wild-type yeast, although it could not basically restore the growth defect on galactose by antimycin A. These results suggest that the PGSI gene product has an important role in utilization of galactose by Gal genes, and that intact mitochondrial function with PGS1 should be required for galactose incorporation into the Leloir pathway. The PGS1 gene might provide a clue to resolve the historic issue about the incapability of galactose with deteriorated mitochondrial function.

• Journal of Aerospace System Engineering
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.59-66
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• 2016

India and China are capable of developing indigenous space launch vehicles, with the rocket technology transferred from the U.S., Western countries, and the Soviet Union, in the 1950s and 1960s. Barring the early 1990s, both countries are absent in the missile nonproliferation regime, and have no major space cooperation records with the U.S., since the establishment of the Missile Technology Control Regime in 1987. With the advent of the $21^{st}$ century, historic progress has been made in the U.S.-India space cooperation, which includes using Indian launch vehicles to launch U.S.non-commercial satellites. However, the U.S. is skeptical with regards to space cooperation and using Chinese space launch vehicle services. In this paper, we present the U.S. nonproliferation policy applied on launch vehicles of India and China, and different aspects of the policy will be examined to draw implications on Korean space activities.

• Food Science of Animal Resources
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• v.33 no.6
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• pp.715-722
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• 2013

Heugu (Korea Black Cattle) is one of the indigenous cattle breeds in Korea; however there has been severe lack of genomic studies on the breed. In this study, we report the first whole genome resequencing of Heugu at higher sequence coverage using Illumina HiSeq 2000 platform. More than 153.6 Giga base pairs sequence was obtained, of which 97% of the reads were mapped to the bovine reference sequence assembly (UMD 3.1). The number of non-redundantly mapped sequence reads corresponds to approximately 28.9-fold coverage across the genome. From these data, we identified a total of over six million single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), of which 29.4% were found to be novel using the single nucleotide polymorphism database build 137. Extensive annotation was performed on all the detected SNPs, showing that most of SNPs were located in intergenic regions (70.7%), which is well corresponded with previous studies. Of the total SNPs, we identified substantial numbers of non-synonymous SNPs (13,979) in 5,999 genes, which could potentially affect meat quality traits in cattle. These results provide genome-wide SNPs that can serve as useful genetic tools and as candidates in searches for phenotype-altering DNA difference implicated with meat quality traits in cattle. The importance of this study can be further pronounced with the first whole genome sequencing of the valuable local genetic resource to be used in further genomic comparison studies with diverse cattle breeds.

• Korean Journal of Environmental Agriculture
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• v.30 no.2
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• pp.99-104
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• 2011

BACKGROUND: Application of urea may increase $CO_2$ emission from soils due both to $CO_2$ generation from urea hydrolysis and fertilizer-induced decomposition of soil organic carbon (SOC). The objective of this study was to investigate the effects of increasing urea application on $CO_2$ emission from soil and mineralization kinetics of indigenous SOC. METHODS AND RESULTS: Emission of $CO_2$ from a soil amended with four different rates (0, 175, 350, and 700 mg N/kg soil) of urea was investigated in a laboratory incubation experiment for 110 days. Cumulative $CO_2$ emission ($C_{cum}$) was linearly increased with urea application rate due primarily to the contribution of urea-C through hydrolysis to total $CO_2$ emission. First-order kinetics parameters ($C_0$, mineralizable SOC pool size; k, mineralization rate) became greater with increasing urea application rate; $C_0$ increased from 665.1 to 780.3 mg C/kg and k from 0.024 to 0.069 $day^{-1}$, determinately showing fertilizer-induced SOC mineralization. The relationship of $C_0$ (non-linear) and k (linear) with urea-N application rate revealed different responses of $C_0$ and k to increasing rate of fertilizer N. CONCLUSION(s): The relationship of mineralizable SOC pool size and mineralization rate with urea-N application rate suggested that increasing N fertilization may accelerate decomposition of readily decomposable SOC; however, it may not always stimulate decomposition of non-readily decomposable SOC that is protected from microbial decomposition.

• Horticultural Science & Technology
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• v.29 no.3
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• pp.232-239
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• 2011

The genus Acorus is known as an indigenous medicinal plant. Genetic diversity of thirteen accessions of A. calamus and eight of A. gramineus, with an accession of Colocasia antiquorum and two of Iris pseudacorus as outgroups, were evaluated using RAPD markers for cluster analysis and principal coordinate analysis, and NIR spectroscopic profiles for principal component analysis.A total of 371 polymorphic bands were obtained by using the selected 12 random primers. The genetic distances were estimated from 0.03 to 0.31 within A. calamus and from 0.03 to 0.51 within A. gramineus. The dendrogram and three-dimensional plot separated the accessions into four distinct groups (A. calamus, A. gramineus, C. antiquorum, and I. pseudacorus). Moreover, for the diversity among genus Acorus, eleven A. calamus accessions, one A. gramineus accession, and two I. pseudacorus accessions were non-destructively analyzed from their leaves by NIR spectroscopy, which discriminated Acorus accessions like the RAPD analysis. Interestingly, thirteen accessions of A. calamus were clustered into two groups based on RAPD and NIR analyses, which indicates that there are two ecotypes of A. calamus in Korea. An accession (CZ) of A. calamus with yellow stripe on leaves was closely grouped with another (CX) at a genetic distance (GD) of 0.03, which shows that the stripe trait might be generated by chimeric mutation. The genetic distance between A. calamus and A. gramineus was revealed to be farthest from 0.80 to 0.88 GD. In genus Acorus the genetic diversity and genetic variation were identified by using RAPD marker technique and non-destructive NIRs.

• Korean journal of applied entomology
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• v.39 no.1
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• pp.5-12
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• 2000

The sweetpotato whiteflies, Bemisia tabaci(Gennadius), were found recently in Korea on Glycine max, Euphorbia pulcherrima, and Rosa hybrida. The biotype identity of Bemisia tabaci in Korea was determined by several DNA markers including the random amplified polymorphic DNAs, and restriction fragments length polymorphism of mitochondrial 12S and 16S rRNA genes. The electromorph profiles of DNA fragments from the rose(Jincheon) and poinsettia(Seoul) populations in Korea are both identical to those of B biotypes distributed in Australia, Israel, and Japan. The populations of B. tabaci collected on Glycine max, Ipomea batatas, and Perilla frutescens in different localities retained the same DNA markes with the population from Lonicera japonica and shikoku of Japan. These populations are non-B biotype and considered as an indigenous type in the Far Eastern Asia Region including Korea and Japan, Morphological Characteristics of B. Tabaci were also observed by the scanning electron microscope and described with the comparison to the other important whitefly pest, Trialeurodes vaporariorum (Westwood).

• Advances in Energy Research
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• v.4 no.3
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• pp.189-202
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• 2016

This work emphasized optimum production of biodiesel using non-edible Prunus armeniaca (Bitter Apricot) oil via transesterification collected from the high altitude areas of Himachal Pradesh, India. In this study the author produced biodiesel through the process of transesterification by using an alkali catalyst with alcohol (methanol and ethanol), under the varying molar ratio (1:6, 1:9, 1:12), variable catalyst percentage (1% and 2%) and temperature ($70^{\circ}C$, $75^{\circ}C$, $80^{\circ}C$, $85^{\circ}C$). Furthermore, a few strong base catalysts were used that includes sodium hydroxide, potassium hydroxide, sodium metal and freshly prepared sodium methoxide. After screening the catalyst, response surface methodology (RSM) in connection with the central composite design (CCD) was used to statistically evaluate and optimize the biodiesel production operation using NaOH as catalyst. It was found that the production of biodiesel achieved an optimum level biodiesel yield with 97.30% FAME conversion under the following reaction conditions: 1) Methanol/oil molar ratio: 1:6, 2) Reaction time: 3h, 3) Catalyst amount: NaOH 2 wt. %, and 4) Reaction temperature: $85^{\circ}C$. The experimental results showed that the optimum production and conversion of biodiesel through the process of transesterification could be achieved under an optimal set of reaction conditions. The biodiesel obtained showed appropriate fuel properties as specified in ASTM, BIS and En- standards.

• Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.5.1-5.9
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• 2019

Background: Live fish import may lead to the unintended introduction of pathogens. We examined the monthly distribution of microbial pathogens in ornamental finfish imported into South Korea over a 6-month period. Results: Vibrio alginolyticus was detected in one lemon damsel in June and July; V. vulnificus was detected in one lemon damsel, one caerulean damsel, and one pearl-spot chromis and one ocellaris clownfish in July, April, and May, respectively; Photobacterium damselae was detected in one ocellaris clownfish and one caerulean damsel in June and July, respectively; V. anguillarum was detected in one pearl-spot chromis in February; V. harveyi was detected in one ocellaris clownfish and two mandarin fish in February and April, respectively; Yersinia ruckeri was detected in a pearlscale goldfish group in June and July and in two colored carp groups in July; and Lactococcus garvieae was detected in a lemon damsel group and a sutchi catfish group in July and May, respectively. European catfish virus, the only viral pathogen detected, was found in two sutchi catfish groups in May. Conclusion: This study is the first to identify pathogenic species and the presence or absence of pathogens (non-quarantine diseases) in imported ornamental finfish. These results demonstrate that various pathogens with the potential to harm indigenous fish populations can accompany ornamental finfish imported into South Korea.