• International Journal of Oral Biology
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• v.41 no.4
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• pp.217-223
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• 2016

Porphyromonas gingivalis, a foremost periodontal pathogen, has been known to cause periodontal diseases. Epidemiologic evidences have indicated the involvement of P. gingivalis in the development of cardiovascular diseases. In this study, we show that the P. gingivalis lipopolysaccharide increases the mRNA expression and protein secretion of interleukin-6 in vascular smooth muscle cells. We demonstrate that P. gingivalis LPS activates the extracellular signal-regulated kinase 1/2 (ERK1/2), p38 mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK), and Akt, which mediate the IL-6 expression in vascular smooth muscle cells. Also, P. gingivalis LPS stimulates the vascular smooth muscle cell migration, which is a critical step for the progression of atherosclerosis. Moreover, neutralization of the IL-6 function inhibits the migration of vascular smooth muscle cells induced by P. gingivalis LPS. Taken together, these results indicate that P. gingivalis LPS promotes the expression of IL-6, which in turn increases the migration of vascular smooth muscle cells.

• Journal of Microbiology and Biotechnology
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• v.11 no.6
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• pp.915-921
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• 2001

Phytase improves the bioavailability of phytate phosphorus in plant foods to humans and animals, and reduces the phosphorus pollution of animal waste. In order to express a high level of fungal phytase in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, various expression vectors were constructed with different combinations of promoters, translation enhancers, signal peptides, and terminator. Three different promoters fused to the phytase gene (phyA) from Aspergillus niger were tested: a galactokinase (GAL1) promoter, glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase (GPD) promoter, and yeast hybrid ADH2-GPD promoter consisting of alcohol dehydrogenase II (ADH2) and a GPD promoter. The signal peptides of phytase, glucose oxidase (GO), and rice amylase 1A(RAmy1A) were included. Plus, the translation enhancers of the ${\Omega}$ sequence and UTR70 from the tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) and spinach, respectively, were also tested. Among the recombinant vectors, pGphyA06 containing the GPD promoter, the ${\Omega}$ sequence, RAmy1A, and GAL7 terminator expressed the highest phytase activity in a culture filtrate, which was estimated at 20 IU/ml. An intracellular localization of the expressed phytase activity in a culture filtrate, which was estimated at 20 IU/ml. An intracellular localization of the expressed phytase was also performed by inserting an endoplasmic reticulum (ER) retention signal, KDEL sequence, into the C-terminus of the phytase within the vector pHphyA-6. It appeared that the KDEL sequence directed most of the early expression of phytase into the intracellular compartment yet more than $60\%$ of the total phytase activity was still retained within the cell even after the prolonged (>3 days) incubation of the transformant. However, the intracellular enzyme activity of the transformant without a KDEL sequence was as high as that of the extracellular one, thereby strongly suggesting that the secretion of phytase in S. cerevisiae appeared to be the rate-limiting step for the expression of a large amount of extracellular recombinant phytase, when compared with other yeasts.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SC
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• v.39 no.4
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• pp.16-24
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• 2002

This work describes a 10b 120 MSample/s CMOS pipelined A/D converter(ADC) based on a merged-capacitor switching(MCS) technique for high signal processing speed and high resolution. The proposed ADC adopts a typical multi-step pipelined architecture to optimize sampling rate, resolution, and chip area, and employs a MCS technique which improves sampling rate and resolution reducing the number of unit capacitor used in the multiplying digital-to-analog converter (MDAC). The proposed ADC is designed and implemented in a 0.25 um double-poly five-metal n-well CMOS technology. The measured differential and integral nonlinearities are within ${\pm}$0.40 LSB and ${\pm}$0.48 LSB, respectively. The prototype silicon exhibits the signal-to-noise-and-distortion ratio(SNDR) of 58 dB and 53 dB at 100 MSample/s and 120 MSample/s, respectively. The ADC maintains SNDR over 54 dB and the spurious-free dynamic range(SFDR) over 68 dB for input frequencies up to the Nyquist frequency at 100 MSample/s. The active chip area is 3.6 $mm^2$(＝ 1.8 mm ${\times}$ 2.0 mm) and the chip consumes 208 mW at 120 MSample/s.

• Journal of IKEEE
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.1025-1030
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• 2018

The proposed modulator is designed by utilizing a conventional structure employing time division technique to realize the 4th order delta-sigma modulator using one op-amp. In order to reduce the influence of KT/C noise, the capacitance in the first and second integrators reused was chosen to be 20pF and capacitance of third and fourth integrators was designed to be 1pF. The stage variable technique in the low power reconfigurable op-amp was used to solve the stability issue due to different capacitance loads for the reduction of KT/C noise. This technique enabled the proposed modulator to reduce the power consumption of 15% with respect to the conventional one. The proposed modulator was fabricated with 0.18um CMOS N-well 1 poly 6 metal process and consumes 305uW at supply voltage of 1.8V. The measurement results demonstrated that SNDR, ENOB, DR, FoM(Walden), and FoM(Schreier) were 66.3 dB, 10.6 bits, 83 dB, 98 pJ/step, and 142.8 dB at the sampling frequency of 256kHz, oversampling ratio of 128, clock frequency of 1.024 MHz, and input frequency of 250 Hz, respectively.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.21 no.6
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• pp.642-649
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• 2001

Precision parts and instruments are tested to evaluate performance in development-process and product-step to prement a potential defect due to a failure design. In this paper, Environmental test technology, which is the basis of reliability analysis, is introduced with examples of test criterion, test method for products, encoder and traffic signal controller, and measuring instruments. Recently, as the importance of the environmental test technology is recognised. It is proposed that tranining of test technician and technology of jig design and failure analysis are very essential.

• International Journal of Control, Automation, and Systems
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• v.6 no.3
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• pp.413-423
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• 2008

The template matching method is used as a simple method to track objects or patterns that we want to search for in the input image data from image sensors. It recognizes a segment with the highest correlation as a target. The concept of this method is similar to that of SNF (Strongest Neighbor Filter) that regards the measurement with the highest signal intensity as target-originated among other measurements. The SNF assumes that the strongest neighbor (SN) measurement in the validation gate originates from the target of interest and the SNF utilizes the SN in the update step of a standard Kalman filter (SKF). The SNF is widely used along with the nearest neighbor filter (NNF), due to computational simplicity in spite of its inconsistency of handling the SN as if it is the true target. Probabilistic Strongest Neighbor Filter for m validated measurements (PSNF-m) accounts for the probability that the SN in the validation gate originates from the target while the SNF assumes at any time that the SN measurement is target-originated. It is known that the PSNF-m is superior to the SNF in performance at a cost of increased computational load. In this paper, we suggest an image tracking algorithm that combines the template matching and the PSNF-m to estimate the states of a tracked target. Computer simulation results are included to demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithm in comparison with other algorithms.

• The Korean Journal of Physiology and Pharmacology
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• v.1 no.4
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• pp.385-392
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• 1997

The phospholipase C (PLC)-mediated intracellular signal transduction pathway is considered to be involved in the regulation of blood pressure. However, little information is available concerning the distributional and functional significance of PLC in the genetic hypertensive rats. As the first step of knowing the role of PLC on hypertension, we investigated the distribution of 6 PLC isozymes $(PLC-{\beta}1,\;-{\beta}3,\;-{\beta}4,\;-{\gamma}1,\;-{\gamma}2\;and\;-{\delta}1)$ in the heart and brain, which are concerned with hypertension, in the normotensive Wistar-Kyoto rat (WKY) and spontaneously hypertensive rat (SHR) using the western blotting and immunocytochemistry. The immunoreactivities of PLC isozymes in brain were detected, but there were no distributional and quantitative differences between the WKY and SHR. In the heart, but the immunoreactivities to $PLC-{\beta}1$ and $-{\gamma}2$ in the SHR were higher than those in WKY. In immunocytochemistry to confirm these western blotting data, $PLC-{\beta}1$ and $-{\gamma}2$ were localized in cardiac myocytes and the intensities of immunoreactivity in SHR were stronger than that in WKY. These results suggest that $PLC-{\beta}1$ and $-{\gamma}2$ would have possibility to concern with the establishment of spontaneous hypertension.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.26 no.6
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• pp.373-381
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• 2005

The respiratory and heart beat signals are the fundamental physiological signals for sleep monitoring in the home. Using the air mattress sensor system, the respiration and heart beat movements can be measured without any harness or sensor on the subject's body which makes long term measurement difficult and troublesome. The differential measurement technique between two air cells is adopted to enhance the sensitivity. The concept of the balancing tube between two air cells is suggested to increase the robustness against postural changes during the measurement period. With this balancing tube, the meaningful frequency range could be selected by the pneumatic filter method. The mathematical model for the air mattress and balancing tube was suggested and the validation experiments were performed for step and sinusoidal input. The results show that the balancing tube can eliminate the low frequency component between two cells effectively. This technique was applied to measure the respiration and heart beat on the bed, which shows the potential applications for sleep monitoring device in home. With the analysis of the waveform, respiration intervals and heart beat intervals were calculated and compared with the signal from conventional methods. The results show that the measurement from air mattress with balancing tube can be used for monitoring respiration and heart beat in various situations.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.20 no.6
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• pp.612-618
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• 2014

A pattern classifier-based approach for recognizing internal states of human participants in interactions is presented along with its experimental results. The approach includes a step for collecting video recordings of human-human interactions or humanrobot interactions and subsequently analyzing the videos based on human coded annotations. The annotation includes social signals directly observed in the video recordings and the internal states of human participants indirectly inferred from those observed social signals. Then, a pattern classifier is trained using the annotation data, and tested. In our experiments on human-robot interaction, 7 video recordings were collected and annotated with 20 social signals and 7 internal states. Several experiments were performed to obtain an 84.83% recall rate for interaction engagement, 93% for concentration intention, and 81% for task comprehension level using a C4.5 based decision tree classifier.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.33 no.3
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• pp.335-343
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• 2011

The pad pitch of modern radio frequency integrated circuits is in the order of few tens of micrometers. Connecting a large number of high-speed I/Os to the outside world with good signal fidelity at low cost is an extremely challenging task. To cope with this requirement, we need reflection-free transmission lines from an on-chip pad to on-board SMA connectors. Such a transmission line is very hard to design due to the difference in on-chip and on-board feature size and the requirement for extremely large bandwidth. In this paper, we propose the use of narrow tracks close to chip and wide tracks away from the chip. This narrow-to-wide transition in width results in impedance discontinuity. A step change in substrate thickness is utilized to cancel the effect of the width discontinuity, thus achieving a reflection-free microstrip. To verify the concept, several microstrips were designed on multilayer FR4 PCB without any additional manufacturing steps. The TDR measurements reveal that the impedance variation is less than 3 ${\Omega}$ for a 50 ${\Omega}$ microstrip and S11 better than -9 dB for the frequency range 1 GHz to 6 GHz when the width changes from 165 ${\mu}m$ to 940 ${\mu}m$, and substrate thickness changes from 100 ${\mu}m$ to 500 ${\mu}m$.