• Journal of Microbiology and Biotechnology
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• v.17 no.8
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• pp.1249-1253
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• 2007

A hyperthermostable endoglucanase from Pyrococcus horikoshii with the capability of hydrolyzing crystalline cellulose was analyzed. A protein engineering study was carried out to obtain a reduced-size mutant. Five amino acid residues at both the N- and C-terminus were found to be removable without any loss of activity or thermal stability. Site-directed mutagenesis was also performed on R102, N200, E201, H297, Y299, E342, and W377, residues possibly involved in the active center or in the recognition and binding of a cellulose substrate. The activity of the resulting mutants was considerably decreased, confirming that the mutated residues were all important for activity. A reduced-size enzyme, as active as the wild-type endoglucanase, was successfully obtained, plus the residues critical for its activity and specificity were confirmed. Consequently, an engineered enzyme with a reduced size was obtained, and the amino acids essential for activity were confirmed by site-directed mutagenesis and comparison with a known three-dimensional structure.

• Bulletin of the Korean Chemical Society
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• v.22 no.11
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• pp.1255-1260
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• 2001

The expansion of two different kinds of hydrodynamic size of polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA Mw: 1.56- 2.04 ${\times}$ 106 g/mol) has been measured by dynamic light scattering and viscometry above the Flory $\theta$ temperature of the variou s solvents such as n-butyl chloride, 3-heptanone, and 4-heptanone. The expansion of PMMA chains was analyzed in terms of universal temperature parameters and also compared with previous results of polystyrene (PS) system. First it was found that simple $\tau/{\tau}c$ parameter no longer had its universality for the expansion behavior of hydrodynamic size in the chemically different linear polymer chains. However after modifying ${\tau}/{\tau}c$ parameter into $(Mw/Ro2)3}2(\tau/\tauc)$, we observed a much better universality for both PMMA and PS systems. Here Mw, Ro, $\tau[=(T-{\theta}$)/${\theta}$]$, and ${\tau}c[=({\theta}-Tc)/Tc]$ are defined as the weight average molecular weight, the unperturbed end-to-end distance, the reduced temperature and the reduced critical temperature, respectively.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.26 no.6
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• pp.615-621
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• 2004

Next generation mobile communication system, such as IMT-2000, adopts Turbo codes due to their powerful error correction capability. This paper presents a block-wise maximum a posteriori (MAP) Turbo decoding structure with a low memory requirement. During this research, it has been observed that the training size and block size determine the amount of required memory and bit-error rate (BER) performance of the block-wise MAP decoder, and that comparable BER performance can be obtained with much shorter blocks when the training size is sufficient. Based on this observation, a new decoding structure is proposed and presented in this paper. The proposed block-wise decoder employs a decoding scheme for reducing the memory requirement by setting the training size to be N times the block size. The memory requirement for storing the branch and state metrics can be reduced 30% to 45%, and synthesis results show that the overall memory area can be reduced by 5.27% to 7.29%, when compared to previous MAP decoders. The decoder throughput can be maintained in the proposed scheme without degrading the BER performance.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.29 no.7 s.238
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• pp.1022-1027
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• 2005

In this study, ball milling process was applied to reduce the particle size of bio-material down to submicron size. The material used was Ibuprofen. The ball milling was performed at low temperature of about $-180^{\circ}C$. The effect of processing conditions (milling time, milling speed) on the particle size was determined. The results showed that the degree of crystallite of Ibuprofen was slightly reduced by the ball milling process. The results also showed that the size of Ibuprofen was significantly reduced by the ball milling process. The effect of milling time was significant within the milling time of six hours while it was small thereafter.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.337-346
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• 2005

The paper reports on a study of bond strength between reduced-water-content concrete and tensile reinforcement in spliced mode. Three different diameters (12, 16 and 22 mm) of tensile steel were spliced in the constant moment zone, where there were two bars of same size in tension. For each diameter of reinforcement, a total of nine beams ($1900{\times}270{\times}180mm$) were tested, of which three beams were with no axial force (positive bending) and the other six beams were with axial force (combined bending). The splice length was selected so that bars would fail in bond, splitting the concrete cover in the splice region, before reaching the yield point. It was found that there was a considerable size effect in the experimental results, i.e., as the diameter of the reinforcement reduced the bond strength and the deflection recorded at the midspan increased significantly, whilst the stiffness of the beams reduced. It was also found for all reinforcement sizes that higher bond strength and stiffness were obtained for beams tested in combined bending than that of the beams tested in positive bending only.

• Proceedings of the KSME Conference
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• 2003.11a
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• pp.1240-1245
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• 2003

Reduced activation ferritic steel (JLF-1) is considered as a promising candidate material for blanket or first-wall structure of D-T fusion reactors. The fracture tests of fracture resistance curve (J-R curve) and $J_{IC}$ are desirable to investigate the exact fracture toughness of JLF-1 steel, since it has a high ductility. The fracture toughness of JLF-1 steel is affected by the configuration of test specimen such side groove, specimen thickness or specimen size. In this study, the fracture toughness tests were performed with various size(plane size and thickness) and various side groove of specimens. The test results showed the standard specimen with the side groove of 40 % represented a valid fracture toughness. The fracture resistance curve increased with increasing plane size and decreased with increasing thickness. However, the fracture resistance curve of half size specimen was similar to that of the standard specimen.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.28 no.5
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• pp.607-614
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• 2006

This paper presents a new class of microstrip slow-wave open-loop resonator filters with reduced size and improved stopband characteristics. A comprehensive treatment of both ends loaded with triangular and rectangular ends is described, leading to the invention of a microstrip slow-wave open-loop resonator. Two-resonator and four-resonator bandpass filters are designed at the operating frequency of about 2 GHz, and a bandwidth of 60 MHz. The size of the slow-wave open-loop resonator is optimized from the standpoint of the unloaded Q-factor. The filters are not only compact in size due to the slow-wave effect, but also have a wider upper stopband resulting from the dispersion effect. The filter designs of this type are described in details. The experimental results are demonstrated and discussed.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.85-94
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• 2003

In this paper an algorithm to reduce the size of Text-to-Speech database is proposed. The algorithm is based on the characteristics of Korean phonemic units. From the initial database, a reduced phoneme unit set is induced by articulatory similarity of concatenating phonemes. Speech data is read by one female announcer for 1000 phonetically balanced sentences. All the recorded speech is then segmented by phoneticians. Total size of the original speech data is about 640 MB including laryngograph signal. To synthesize wave, RE-PSOLA (Residual-Excited Pitch Synchronous Overlap and Add Method) was used. The voice quality of synthesized speech was compared with original speech in terms of spectrographic informations and objective tests. The quality of the synthesized speech is not much degraded when the size of synthesis DB was reduced from 320 MB to 82 MB.

• Molecules and Cells
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• v.42 no.10
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• pp.711-720
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• 2019

Sink strength optimizes sucrose import, which is fundamental to support developing seed grains and increase crop yields, including those of rice (Oryza sativa). In this regard, little is known about the function of vacuolar invertase (VIN) in controlling sink strength and thereby seed size. Here, in rice we analyzed mutants of two VINs, OsVIN1 and OsVIN2, to examine their role during seed development. In a phenotypic analysis of the T-DNA insertion mutants, only the OsVIN2 mutant osvin2-1 exhibited reduced seed size and grain weight. Scanning electron microscopy analysis revealed that the small seed grains of osvin2-1 can be attributed to a reduction in spikelet size. A significant decrease in VIN activity and hexose level in the osvin2-1 spikelets interfered with spikelet growth. In addition, significant reduction in starch and increase in sucrose, which are characteristic features of reduced turnover and flux of sucrose due to impaired sink strength, were evident in the pre-storage stage of osvin2-1 developing grains. In situ hybridization analysis found that expression of OsVIN2 was predominant in the endocarp of developing grains. A genetically complemented line with a native genomic clone of OsVIN2 rescued reduced VIN activity and seed size. Two additional mutants, osvin2-2 and osvin2-3 generated by the CRISPR/Cas9 method, exhibited phenotypes similar to those of osvin2-1 in spikelet and seed size, VIN activity, and sugar metabolites. These results clearly demonstrate an important role of OsVIN2 as sink strength modulator that is critical for the maintenance of sucrose flux into developing seed grains.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea TC
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• v.39 no.3
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• pp.125-131
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• 2002

In this paper, a new concatenation scheme of serial concatenated convolutional codes is proposed and the performance analyzed. In the proposed scheme, each of information and parity bits of outer code is entered into inner code through interleaver and deinterleaver. Therefore, the interleaver size is same as the length of input frame. Since the interleaver size of proposed type is reduced to half of the conventional Benedetto type, the interleaver delay time required for iterative decoding is reduced. In addition the multiplexer and demultiplexer are not used in the decoder of the proposed type, the complexity of decoder can be also reduced. As results of simulation, the performance of proposed type shows the better error performance as compared to that of the conventional Benedetto type in case of the same interleaver size. And it can be observed that the difference of BER performance is increased with the increase of Eb/No. In case of the same length of input frame, the proposed type shows almost same performance with Benedetto type despite that the interleaver size is reduced by half.