• KOREAN JOURNAL OF CROP SCIENCE
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• v.64 no.1
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• pp.55-62
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• 2019

Rapeseed meal, which is a byproduct of rapeseed oil extraction, improves crop productivity by supplying nutrients to the soil. The present study aimed to manufacture fermented rapeseed meal compost using two effective microbial agents and evaluate their efficiency as fertilizer. To types of fermented rapeseed meal, manufactured using either a bio-carrier or microbial agent, showed no differences in pH, electrical conductivity (EC), and total nitrogen content. However, the contents of $NH_4-N$ and $NO_3-N$ as inorganic nitrogen were increased by 5.6 times and 1.5 times, respectively, after 5 d of fermentation. Rapeseed meal fermented for 5 d was applied to tomato a basal fertilizer and after eight weeks, the plant height increased in all fermented rapeseed treatments compared to that in the chemical fertilizer treatment, and also the quantum yield of photosystem II (PS II) showed the same trend. The total nitrogen content of tomato leaves treated with a microbial fermented rapeseed meal was twice as high as that of that treated with a chemical fertilizer. It was confirmed that the increase in the tomato height was an effect of the rapeseed meal containing inorganic nitrogen, which can easily be absorbed by plants. From these results, it is considered that fermented rapeseed meal manufactured with an effective microbial agent for 5 d showed the highest inorganic nutrient content and greatest growth enhancement in tomato.

• Journal of Life Science
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• v.28 no.11
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• pp.1339-1346
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• 2018

In Korea, edible mushrooms are produced largely on commercial artificial media, so the annual production of spent mushroom substrate (SMS), as a by-product of the mushroom industry, is estimated at over 200 million tons. This SMS is assumed to contain abundant fungal mycelia and pre-fruiting bodies, as well as various nutritive and bioactive compounds that are presently discarded. This study examined the physico-chemical, nutritional, and enzymatic characteristics of uninoculated sterilized medium (USM) and SMS of shiitake mushrooms with the aim of developing a high-value added product from SMS. The contents of crude protein, crude lipid, and ash were higher after the third SMS harvest ($SMS-A-3^{rd}$) than in USM or $SMS-A-1^{st}$. The contents of Ca, Mg, and P in $SMS-A-3^{rd}$ were 2.95, 2.35, and 2.1-fold higher compared than in USM. No As or Cd was detected in USM or SMS. The pH, Brix, and acidity were 4.6, 20.0, and 1.4, respectively in $SMS-A-3^{rd}$, but 5.6, 6.0, and 0.0, respectively, in USM. These results suggest a highly active production of soluble components and organic acids in $SMS-A-3^{rd}$. The distinct color differences noted for USM, $SMS-A-1^{st}$, and $SMS-A-3^{rd}$ could be used as a mycelial growth indicator. Enzyme activity assays using the APIZYM system showed that SMS is a potent source of hydrolysis-related enzymes, especially esterase (C4) and ${\beta}$-glucuronidase. Our results suggested that the SMS of shiitake has a high potential for use in environmental, agricultural, and stock-breeding industries, for example, as active ingredients for sewage treatment, waste-polymer degradation, and feed additives.

• Food Science and Industry
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• v.52 no.2
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• pp.188-201
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• 2019

In the past, food additives were classified and managed as chemical synthetic and natural additives according to the manufacturing process, but it was difficult to confirm the purpose or function of food additives.CODEX, an internationalstandard, classifies food additives according to their practical use, based on scientific evidence on the technical effects of food additives, instead of classifying them as synthetic or natural. Therefore, very recently, the food additive standards in Korea have been completely revised in accordance with these global trends. Currently, the classification system of food additives is divided into 31 uses to specify their functions and purposes instead of manufacturing methods. Newer revision of the legislative framework for defining and expanding the scope of the Act as an enlarged area is required. Competition for preempting new food products based on bio-based technology is very fierce in order to enhance the safety of domestic people and maximize the economic profit of their own countries. In this age of infinite competition, it is very urgent to revise or supplement the current regulations in order to revitalize the domestic food industry and enhance national competitiveness through the development of food additives using new biotechnology. In this report, current laws on domestic food ingredients, food additives and manufacturing methods, and a comparison of domestic and foreign advanced countries' regulations and countermeasures strategies were reviewed to improve national competitiveness of domestic advanced biotechnology-based food additives industry.

• Clean Technology
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.223-230
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• 2019

This research was performed to evaluate the characteristics of food waste from 5 areas in Gangwon Province, Korea and to predict the $CH_4$ gas production rate. Food wastes were sampled in July and September, 2017. The amount of methane gas generation was evaluated through the biochemical methane potential (BMP) test and a calculation method using chemical composition. Average bulk density and pH of the food wastes were in the range of $0.758{\sim}0.850g\;cm^{-3}$ and 4.29 ~ 4.75, respectively. By physical composition, vegetables were the highest with 56.43 ~ 72.81% with fruits recording 5.31 ~ 8.95%, cereals 1.60 ~ 18.73%, fish and meat 4.47 ~ 12.11%, and filtrate 1.76 ~ 3.64%. The average water content was 69.30 ~ 75.87%, and VS and ash content were 22.50 ~ 27.98% and 1.63 ~ 2.48%, respectively. In addition, $BOD_5$, $COD_{Cr}$, and $COD_{Mn}$ were in the ranges of $17,690.3{\sim}33,154.9mg\;L^{-1}$, $106,212.3{\sim}128,695.5mg\;L^{-1}$, and $51,266.1{\sim}63,426.3mg\;L^{-1}$, respectively. The NaCl content ranged from 0.81 to 1.17%. The results of elemental analysis showed that the contents of C, H, O, N, and S were 44.87 ~ 48.1%, 7.12 ~ 7.57%, 40.13 ~ 43.78%, 3.22 ~ 4.14%, and 0.00 ~ 0.02%, respectively. In a comparison of the methane production yield per VS mass of food waste, there was no significant difference between the cumulative amount (${0.303{\sim}0.354m_{CH4}}^3\;{kg_{VS}}^{-1}$) by the BMP test and the theoretical amount (${0.294{\sim}0.352m_{CH4}}^3\;{kg_{VS}}^{-1}$) calculated by chemical composition.

• Korean Journal of Ecology and Environment
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• v.52 no.3
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• pp.210-220
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• 2019

Population growth and the increase of energy consumption due to civilization caused global warming. Temperature on the Earth rose about $0.7^{\circ}C$ for the last 100 years, the rate is accelerated since 2000. Temperature is a factor, which determines physiological action, growth and development, survival, etc. of the plant together with light intensity and precipitation. Therefore, it is expected that global warming would affect broadly geographic distribution of the plant as well as structure and function ecosystem. In order to understand the effect of global warming on the ecosystem, a study about the effect of temperature rise on germination and growth in the plant is required necessarily. This study was carried out to investigate the effects of experimental warming on the germination and growth of two oak species(Quercus mongolica and Q. serrata) in temperature gradient chamber(TGC). This study was conducted in control, medium warming treatment($+1.7^{\circ}C$; Tm), and high warming treatment ($+3.2^{\circ}C$; Th) conditions. The final germination percentage, mean germination time and germination rate of two oak species increased by the warming treatment, and the increase in Q. serrata was higher than that in Q. mongolica. Root collar diameter, seedling height, leaf dry weight, stem dry weight, root dry weight, and total biomass were the highest in Tm treatment. Butthey were not significantly different in the Th treatment. In the Th treatment, Q. serrata had significantly higher H/D ratio, S/R ratio, and low root mass ratio (RMR) compared with control plot. Q. mongolica had lower RMR and higher S/R ratio in the Tm and Th treatments compared with control plot. Therefore, growth of Q. mongolica are expected to be more vulnerable to warming than that of Q. serrata. The main findings of this study, species-specific responses to experimental warming, could be applied to predict ecosystem changes from global warming. From the result of this study, we could deduce that temperature rise would increase germination of Q. serrata and Q. mongolica and consequently contribute to increase establishment rate in the early growth stage of the plants. But we have to consider diverse variables to understand properly the effects that global warming influences germination in natural condition. Treatment of global warming in the medium level increased the growth and the biomass of both Q. serrata and Q. mongolica. But the result of treatment in the high level showed different aspects. In particular, Q. mongolica, which grows in cooler zones of higher elevation on mountains or northward in latitude, responded more sensitively. Synthesized the results mentioned above, continuous global warming would function in stable establishment of both plants unfavorably. Compared the responses of both sample plants on temperature rise, Q. serrata increased germination rate more than Q. mongolica and Q. mongolica responded more sensitively than Q. serrata in biomass allocation with the increase of temperature. It was estimated that these results would due to a difference of microclimate originated from the spatial distribution of both plants.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.43-61
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• 2019

Development of technologies in artificial intelligence has been rapidly increasing with the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and researches related to AI have been actively conducted in a variety of fields such as autonomous vehicles, natural language processing, and robotics. These researches have been focused on solving cognitive problems such as learning and problem solving related to human intelligence from the 1950s. The field of artificial intelligence has achieved more technological advance than ever, due to recent interest in technology and research on various algorithms. The knowledge-based system is a sub-domain of artificial intelligence, and it aims to enable artificial intelligence agents to make decisions by using machine-readable and processible knowledge constructed from complex and informal human knowledge and rules in various fields. A knowledge base is used to optimize information collection, organization, and retrieval, and recently it is used with statistical artificial intelligence such as machine learning. Recently, the purpose of the knowledge base is to express, publish, and share knowledge on the web by describing and connecting web resources such as pages and data. These knowledge bases are used for intelligent processing in various fields of artificial intelligence such as question answering system of the smart speaker. However, building a useful knowledge base is a time-consuming task and still requires a lot of effort of the experts. In recent years, many kinds of research and technologies of knowledge based artificial intelligence use DBpedia that is one of the biggest knowledge base aiming to extract structured content from the various information of Wikipedia. DBpedia contains various information extracted from Wikipedia such as a title, categories, and links, but the most useful knowledge is from infobox of Wikipedia that presents a summary of some unifying aspect created by users. These knowledge are created by the mapping rule between infobox structures and DBpedia ontology schema defined in DBpedia Extraction Framework. In this way, DBpedia can expect high reliability in terms of accuracy of knowledge by using the method of generating knowledge from semi-structured infobox data created by users. However, since only about 50% of all wiki pages contain infobox in Korean Wikipedia, DBpedia has limitations in term of knowledge scalability. This paper proposes a method to extract knowledge from text documents according to the ontology schema using machine learning. In order to demonstrate the appropriateness of this method, we explain a knowledge extraction model according to the DBpedia ontology schema by learning Wikipedia infoboxes. Our knowledge extraction model consists of three steps, document classification as ontology classes, proper sentence classification to extract triples, and value selection and transformation into RDF triple structure. The structure of Wikipedia infobox are defined as infobox templates that provide standardized information across related articles, and DBpedia ontology schema can be mapped these infobox templates. Based on these mapping relations, we classify the input document according to infobox categories which means ontology classes. After determining the classification of the input document, we classify the appropriate sentence according to attributes belonging to the classification. Finally, we extract knowledge from sentences that are classified as appropriate, and we convert knowledge into a form of triples. In order to train models, we generated training data set from Wikipedia dump using a method to add BIO tags to sentences, so we trained about 200 classes and about 2,500 relations for extracting knowledge. Furthermore, we evaluated comparative experiments of CRF and Bi-LSTM-CRF for the knowledge extraction process. Through this proposed process, it is possible to utilize structured knowledge by extracting knowledge according to the ontology schema from text documents. In addition, this methodology can significantly reduce the effort of the experts to construct instances according to the ontology schema.

• Korean Journal of Clinical Laboratory Science
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• v.51 no.2
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• pp.245-251
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• 2019

This study examined the effects of 2-methoxy-1,4-naphthoquinone (MQ) on the monocyte chemoattractant protein-1 (MCP-1)-induced migration of monocytes, which is an important phenomenon for the body defense and immune response. MQ is a major component extracted from Impatiens balsamina leaves, which have been used for many years in Asian medicine for the treatment of a range of diseases and pain. The cytotoxicity of MQ began to appear at a concentration of $10{\mu}M$, and approximately 50% cytotoxicity was confirmed at $100{\mu}M$. The MCP-1 induced migration of the THP-1 monocyte cell line increased after MQ treatment in a dose dependent manner and the largest increase was observed at $0.1{\mu}M$. The level of cAMP expression decreased after a treatment with $0.1{\mu}M$ MQ. The phosphorylation of extracellular signal-regulated kinases 1/2 (Erk1/2), a key signaling protein involved in the signaling pathway of C-C motif chemokine receptor 2 (CCR2), a receptor for MCP-1, was increased by the simultaneous treatment of $0.1{\mu}M$ MQ. These results show that MQ increases the MCP-1-induced migration of THP-1, decreases the level of cAMP expression, and increases the level of Erk1/2 phosphorylation.

• Journal of Nutrition and Health
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• v.54 no.5
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• pp.547-559
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• 2021

Purpose: This study compares the snacking pattern, diet, lifestyle, and food preference of children by evaluating the most frequently eaten snacks. Methods: The survey enrolled 435 students from three elementary schools in Gyeonggi. Based on the most frequently eaten snacks, the subjects were divided into 3 groups: fruits and milk/dairy products for natural snacks (NS, n = 114); noodles, snack foods and fast foods for meal-like snacks (MS, n = 74); cookies, beverages and bread as sweet snacks (SS, n = 247). Results: Compared to the MS group, preferences of the NS group were significantly higher for jabgokbap (cooked rice with multi-grains, p < 0.05) and saengchae (seasoned raw vegetables, p < 0.01), and significantly lower for gogitwigim (deep-fried meat, p < 0.05). Taste preference of the NS group was considered to be more desirable; the taste preference of more subjects was 'sweet taste' in the SS group, 'spicy taste' in the MS group, 'salty taste' in the MS and SS groups, and 'sour taste' and 'bland taste' in the NS group than the other groups. Compared to the MS and SS groups, the NS group was determined to exercise more frequently; exercising for more than 30 minutes/day was determined to be 76.3% in the NS group and 58.1% and 57.9% in the other groups (p < 0.01). Moreover, a higher proportion of subjects in the MS group tended to answer 'not hungry' as the reason for leaving school meals, as compared to other groups (p = 0.055), thereby suggesting that inappropriate snacking habits interfere with regular meals. Conclusion: This study provides evidence that healthy snacking habits, which include natural snacks such as milk/dairy products and fruits, are important for children during the elementary school years, since these habits are associated with healthier diet, lifestyle, and food and taste preferences. These results provide basic information for developing nutritional education materials for elementary school children.

• Journal of Life Science
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• v.29 no.11
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• pp.1227-1234
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• 2019

Prunus mume, also known as maesil, is a popular fruit consumed in East Asia (Korea, Japan, and China). It contains high amounts of organic acids, minerals, and polyphenols and has been used as a medication for fever, vomiting, and detoxification. In this study, the anti-proliferative and apoptotic effects of solvent fractions from maesil were evaluated using sulforhodamine B (SRB) assays, morphological evaluations, Hoechst 33258 staining, and western blotting. Addition of the maesil methanol fraction (MMF) and the maesil butanol fraction (MBF) significantly and dose-dependently decreased the cell viability of HT-29 human colon cancer cells. Colony-forming assays confirmed that the MMF and MBF treatments decreased colony numbers when compared with untreated control cells. Treatment of HT-29 cells with MMF and MBF caused a distortion of the cell morphology to a shrunken cell mass. Treatment with MMF and MBF also dose-dependently increased nuclear condensation and the formation of apoptotic bodies in HT-29 cells. Treatment with MMF and MBF significantly and dosedependently increased the expression of Bax (a pro-apoptotic protein), caspase-3, and poly ADP-ribose polymerase (PARP) and decreased the expression of Bcl-2 (an anti-apoptotic protein). MMF significantly and dose-dependently inhibited cell proliferation induced by bisphenol A, an environmental hormone. Therefore, MMF may have potential use as a functional food and as a possible therapeutic agent for the prevention of colon cancer.

• Journal of Life Science
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• v.31 no.2
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• pp.126-136
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• 2021

Oxidative stress causes injury to and degeneration of retinal pigment epithelial (RPE) cells. It is involved in several retinal disorders and leads to vision loss. In the present study, we investigated the effect of 14 kinds of natural compounds and two kinds of synthetic compounds on oxidative stress-induced cellular damage in human PRE cell lines (ARPE-19). From among them, we selected five kinds of compounds, including auranofin, FK-509, hemistepsin A, honokiol, and spermidine, which have inhibitory effects against hydrogen peroxide (H2O2)-mediated cytotoxicity. In addition, we found that four kinds of compounds (excluding auranofin) have protective effects on H2O2-induced mitochondrial dysfunction. Furthermore, the expression of phosphorylation of histone H2AX, a sensitive marker of DNA damage, was markedly up-regulated by H2O2, whereas it was notably down-regulated by FK-506, honokiol, and spermidine treatment. Meanwhile, five kinds of candidate compounds had no effect on H2O2-induced intracellular reactive oxygen species (ROS) levels, suggesting that the five candidate compounds have protective effects on oxidative stress-induced cellular damage through the ROS-independent pathway. Taken together, according to the results of H2O2-mediated cellular damage―such as cytotoxicity, apoptosis, mitochondrial dysfunction, and DNA damage―spermidine and FK-506 are the natural and synthetic compounds with the most protective effects against oxidative stress in RPE. Although further studies on the identification of the mechanism responsible are required, the results of the present study suggest the possibility of using spermidine and FK-506 to suppress the risk of retinal disorders.