• Asian-Australasian Journal of Animal Sciences
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• v.12 no.8
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• pp.1324-1331
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• 1999

The aim of this paper is to propose the preservation of buffaloes not only as productive livestock, but also as a part of the biodiversity of wetlands and especially of the Greek wetlands. The water buffalo used to be an integral part of the biodiversity of many Greek wetland ecosystems, enriched their landscape, and provided invaluable services and products to the rural people and to the economy in general. Its total population before the 1950s was over 100,000 animals. Presently, it is found only in four wetland sites in Macedonia and Thrace and in the estuaries of Rivers Gallikos and Axios, with a total population of a few hundred animals. These wetlands are Ramsar Sites. Even this small population is threatened with immediate extinction because of the rapidly changing rural socio-economic conditions and the expansion of cultivated fields into wet meadows. Farmers and consumers are rapidly losing contact with this mammal and its products. This species possesses minimum requirements for treatment and is characterized by the ability of utilizing roughage of variable nutritional value. These factors are promising to render buffalo breeding a valuable branch of the Greek livestock sector, which can also contribute to the maintenance of the wetlands.

• Mycobiology
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• v.39 no.2
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• pp.85-91
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• 2011

We investigated the effect of nutritional and environmental factors on Ophiocordyceps longissima mycelial growth. The longest colony diameter was observed on Schizophyllum (mushroom) genetics complete medium plus yeast extract, Schizophyllum (mushroom) genetics minimal medium, and Sabouraud dextrose agar (SDA); however, malt-extract yeast-extract agar, SDA plus yeast extract, yeast-extract malt-extract peptone dextrose agar, SDA, oatmeal agar, and potato dextrose agar showed higher mycelia density. A temperature of $25^{\circ}C$ was optimum and 7.0 was the optimum pH for mycelial growth. Colony diameter was similar under light and dark conditions. Maltose and yeast extract showed the highest mycelial growth among carbon and nitrogen sources respectively. The effect of mineral salts was less obvious; however, $K_3PO_4$ showed slightly better growth than that of the other mineral salts tested. Among all nutrition sources tested, complex organic nitrogen sources such as yeast extract, peptone, and tryptone were best for mycelial growth of O. longissima. Ophiocordyceps longissima composite medium, formulated by adding maltose (2% w/v), yeast extract (1% w/v), and $K_3PO_4$ (0.05% w/v) resulted in slightly longer colony diameter. In vitro mycelial O. longissima growth was sustainable and the production of fruiting bodies could be used for commercial purposes in the future.

• Clinical and Experimental Reproductive Medicine
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• v.41 no.3
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• pp.97-107
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• 2014

The placenta is a temporary fetomaternal organ capable of supporting fetal growth and development during pregnancy. In particular, abnormal development and dysfunction of the placenta due to cha nges in the proliferation, differentiation, cell death, and invasion of trophoblasts induce several gynecological diseases as well as abnormal fetal development. Autophagy is a catalytic process that maintains cellular structures by recycling building blocks derived from damaged microorganelles or proteins resulting from digestion in lysosomes. Additionally, autophagy is necessary to maintain homeostasis during cellular growth, development, and differentiation, and to protect cells from nutritional deficiencies or factors related to metabolism inhibition. Induced autophagy by various environmental factors has a dual role: it facilitates cellular survival in normal conditions, but the cascade of cellular death is accelerated by over-activated autophagy. Therefore, cellular death by autophagy has been known as programmed cell death type II. Autophagy causes or inhibits cellular death via the other mechanism, apoptosis, which is programmed cell death type I. Recently, it has been reported that autophagy increases in placenta-related obstetrical diseases such as preeclampsia and intrauterine growth retardation, although the mechanisms are still unclear. In particular, abnormal autophagic mechanisms prevent trophoblast invasion and inhibit trophoblast functions. Therefore, the objectives of this review are to examine the characteristics and functions of autophagy and to investigate the role of autophagy in the placenta and the trophoblast as a regulator of cell death.

• Journal of Nutrition and Health
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• v.55 no.1
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• pp.1-9
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• 2022

In the past few decades, great progress has been made on understanding the interaction between nutrition and health status. But despite this wealth of knowledge, health problems related to nutrition continue to increase. This leads us to postulate that the continuing trend may result from a lack of consideration for intra-individual biological variation on dietary responses. Precision nutrition utilizes personal information such as age, gender, lifestyle, diet intake, environmental exposure, genetic variants, microbiome, and epigenetics to provide better dietary advices and interventions. Recent technological advances in the artificial intelligence, big data analytics, cloud computing, and machine learning, have made it possible to process data on a scale and in ways that were previously impossible. A big data platform is built by collecting numerous parameters such as meal features, medical metadata, lifestyle variation, genome diversity and microbiome composition. Sophisticated techniques based on machine learning algorithm can be used to integrate and interpret multiple factors and provide dietary guidance at a personalized or stratified level. The development of a suitable machine learning algorithm would make it possible to suggest a personalized diet or functional food based on analysis of intra-individual metabolic variation. This novel precision nutrition might become one of the most exciting and promising approaches of improving health conditions, especially in the context of non-communicable disease prevention.

• KSBB Journal
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.303-310
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• 1996

The marine microalga Isochrysis galbana Parke was studied to optimize its growth conditions in flask culture. Important medium components studied include nitrogen source, buffer, trace elements and vitamins. Environmental conditions include pH, temperature, light intensity, mixing extent and working volume. The medium prepared from natural sea-waters gave a higher final cell density than the medium prepared from synthetic sea-water Nitrate was a better source than ammonium. In the range of 0.4∼2mM, the final cell density was proportional to the initial nitrate concentration and the cell yield was estimated to be 8.5g dry cell wt/g N. For phosphate, optimal growth was observed in 0.1∼1.0mM but a considerable variation in pH was resulted. The addition of Tris at 5mM or 7mM could stabilize the medium pH, but this significantly reduced both growth rate and final cell density, The effect of trace elements and vitamins was negligible. Optimal temperature and initial pH were $20^{\circ}C$ and 8. When the intensity of incident light was varied in the range of 400∼2100 lux, the growth rate increased from 10mL to 70mL, the final cell density decreased although the initial growth rate did not change. Optimal agitation speed was 100rpm when working volume was 30mL. With optimal conditions, the maximum specific growth rate obtained was 0.021hr-1 and the final cell density was 1.1g/L.

• Mycobiology
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• v.37 no.3
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• pp.171-182
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• 2009

Many aspergilli that belongs to ascomycetes have sexuality. In a homothallic or self-fertile fungus, a number of fruiting bodies or cleistothecia are formed in a thallus grown from a single haploid conidia or ascospores. Genome-sequencing project revealed that two mating genes (MAT) encoding the regulatory proteins that are necessary for controlling partner recognition in heterothallic fungi were conserved in most aspergilli. The MAT gene products in some self-fertile species were not required for recognition of mating partner at pheromone-signaling stage but required at later stages of sexual development. Various environmental factors such as nutritional status, culture conditions and several stresses, influence the decision or progression of sexual reproduction. A large number of genes are expected to be involved in sexual development of Emericella nidulans (anamorph: Aspergillus nidulans), a genetic and biological model organism in aspergilli. The sexual development process can be grouped into several development stages, including the decision of sexual reproductive cycle, mating process, growth of fruiting body, karyogamy followed by meiosis, and sporulation process. Complicated regulatory networks, such as signal transduction pathways and gene expression controls, may work in each stage and stage-to-stage linkages. In this review, the components joining in the regulatory pathways of sexual development, although they constitute only a small part of the whole regulatory networks, are briefly mentioned. Some of them control sexual development positively and some do negatively. Regarding the difficulties for studying sexual differentiation compare to asexual one, recent progresses in molecular genetics of E. nidulans enlarge the boundaries of understanding sexual development in the non-fertile species as well as in fertile fungi.

• Ocean and Polar Research
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• v.33 no.spc3
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• pp.349-358
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• 2011

In order to ascertain latitudinal variation of lipid contents and compositions in copepods, we collected warm water copepod species (Euchaeta sp. and Pleuromamma spp.) from four different regions from low (sub-tropical) to mid (temperate) latitudes in the Northwest Pacific Ocean. Total lipid contents of Pleuromamma spp. were about 11 $ug{\cdot}ind^{-1}$ with little latitudinal variation, whereas Euchaeta sp. showed slightly higher lipid content (20 $ug{\cdot}ind^{-1}$) than Pleuromamma spp. with latitudinal gradient (low at subtropic and high at temperate). Wax esters, known as the major storage lipid classes, were found to be the dominant lipid classes (accounting for more than 35% of total lipids) in Euchaeta sp., whereas in Pleuromamma spp., phospholipids, known as cellular membrane components, were the dominant lipid classes. However, the exception was specimens from warm pool region exhibiting dominance in storage of lipids as a form of triacylglycerols. Among fatty acids, polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA), especially docosahexaenoic acid (DHA : 22:6(n-3)) (about 35% of total fatty acids), were most abundant in Euchaeta sp., while saturated fatty acids (SAFA), specially hexadecanoic acid (16:0) (about 30% of total fatty acids), were most abundant in Pleuromamma spp.. Among the neutral fraction of lipids, phytol, originated from the side chain of chlorophyll, was found in all samples which generally indicate active copepods feeding on algae. While only trace amounts of short-chain fatty alcohols were found in Pleuromamma spp., significant amounts of fatty alcohols were found in Euchaeta sp.. Particularly, significant amounts of long chain monounsaturated fatty alcohols (20:1 and 22:1), generally found in cold water species, were found in Euchaeta sp. from low latitudes. The latitudinal variation of trophic lipid markers in these copepods could be significantly related with in-situ food availability and species-specific diet preference. The result of this study suggests that the lipid contents and compositions in copepods may not only indicate their nutritional condition and feeding ecology but also provide insight into species-specific living strategies under different environmental conditions (i.e. water temperature, food availability).

• Asian-Australasian Journal of Animal Sciences
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.569-582
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• 2004

Current growth in the deer industry is 20% per annum as the demand increases for venison in Europe, including the increased use in Asia of antlers as a natural medicine by humans. The deer industry in Australia has developed rapidly, but farm profitability has fluctuated markedly. The knowledge on deer farming has largely been adopted from New Zealand (NZ) and the United Kingdom (UK) although the environmental conditions in these deer growing countries differ markedly from Australia. The practice used for weaning is one of the key factors influencing the profitability of the industry. However, a wide range in weaning dates are practised by farmers leading to the question of whether deer should be weaned after mating to reduce the stress during weaning or should they be weaned in the pre-rut period to allow does to recover their body condition for the next reproduction cycle. This review examines the effect of weaning time on the performance of does and hinds and the subsequent growth rate of the fawns and calves. Gaps in knowledge of weaning procedures and nutritional management for early weaned deer are identified.

• Korean Journal of Microbiology
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• v.42 no.4
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• pp.239-245
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• 2006

Leucine-responsive Regulatory Protein (Lrp) is a global regulator involved in modulating a variety of metabolic functions, including the catabolism and anabolism of amino acids as well as pili synthesis. In addition, there is growing evidences that Lrp may play an important role when cells make transition between rich and lean nutritional conditions. In this review, the biochemical characteristics of Lrp are described to provide a good example that shows how bacteria adapt to nutrient limitation and environmental stress.

• KOREAN JOURNAL OF CROP SCIENCE
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• v.27 no.4
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• pp.385-397
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• 1982

The climatic impacts have been the environmental constraints with soil characteristics to achieve self sufficiency of food production in Korea. In this paper, the distribution and appearance of impacts and the changes in climatological status due to recent trend of early transplanting of rice are widely discussed to derive some countermeasures against the impacts, being focussed on cultural A long term analysis of the climatic impact appearances of the last 74 years showed that drought, strong wind, flood, cold spell and frost were the major impacts. Before 1970's, the drought damage was the greatest among the climatic impacts; however, the expansion and improvement of irrigation and drainage system markedly decreased the damage of drought and heavy rain. The appearance of cold damage became more frequent than before due to introduction of early transplanting for more thermophilic new varieties. Tongillines which were from Indica and Japonica crosses throw more attention to cold damage for high yields to secure high temperature in heading and ripening stages and lead weakness to cold and drought damage in early growth stage after transplanting. The plants became subject to heavy rain in ripening stage also. For the countermeasures against cold damage, the rational distribution of adequate varieties according to the regional climatic conditions and planting schedule should be imposed on the cultivation. A detoured water way to increase water temperature might be suggestable in the early growth stage. Heavy application of phosphate to boost rooting and tillering also would be a nutritional control method. In the heading and ripening stages, foliar application of phosphate and additional fertilization of silicate might be considerable way of nutritional control. Since the amount of solar radiation and air temperature in dry years were high, healthy plants for high yield could be obtained; therefere, the expansion of irrigation system and development of subsurface water should be performed as one of the national development projects. To minimize the damage of strong wind and rainfall, the rational distribution of varieties with different growing periods in the area where the damage occurred habitualy should be considered with installation of wind breaks. Not only vertical windbreaks but also a horizontal wind break using a net might be a possible way to decrease the white heads in rice field by dry wind. Finally, to establish the integrated countermeasures against the climatic impacts, the detailed interpretation on the regional climatic conditions should be conducted to understand distribution and frequency of the impacts. The expansion of observation net work for agricultural meteorology and development of analysis techniques for meteorological data must be conducted in future together with the development of the new cultural techniques.