• Journal of Ecology and Environment
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• v.46 no.3
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• pp.154-160
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• 2022

Background: The mango is one of the essential fruit trees for the economy of Thailand. Mango pollination relies primarily on insects. Other external forces, such as wind, are less efficient since pollen is sticky and aggregating. There is only one report from Thailand on the use of bees as mango pollinators. The study of the behavior and pollination efficiency of honey bees (Apis mellifera) and stingless bees (Tetragonula laeviceps species complex) was conducted in Nam Dokmai mango plantings in Phrao and Mae Taeng districts, Chiang Mai province, between February and March 2019. Results: Our results reveal that the honey bees commenced foraging earlier than the stingless bee. The number of flowers visited within 1 minute by honey bees was higher than that visited by stingless bees. The average numbers of honey bees and stingless bees that flew out of the hive per minute from 7 a.m. and 6 p.m. in the Phrao district were 4.21 ± 1.62 and 9.88 ± 7.63 bees/min, respectively, i.e., higher than those observed in Mae Taeng, which were 3.46 ± 1.13 and 1.23 ± 1.20 bees/min, respectively. The numbers of fruits per tree were significantly higher in the honey bee and stingless bee treatments (T1 and T2) than in the open pollination treatment (T3). The number of fruits between T1 and T2 treatments was not different. In the pollinator exclusion treatment (T4), no fruit was produced. Fruit size factors were not significantly different among T1, T2, and T3 treatments. Conclusions: Our results showed that insect pollination is crucial for mango production, especially with the Nam Dokmai variety in Northern Thailand. As pollinator exclusion treatment showed no fruit set, and pollinator treatment significantly increased the fruit sets compared to open access plots, a managed pollinator program would benefit the mango growers for better productivity. Both the honey bee and the stingless bee were shown to be effective as pollinators.

• Journal of Microbiology and Biotechnology
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.299-307
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• 2008

Soybean seed ferritin is essential for human iron supplementation and iron deficiency anemia prevention because it contains abundant bioavailable iron and is frequently consumed in the human diet. However, it is poorly understood in regards its several properties, such as iron mineralization, subunit assembly, and protein folding. To address these issues, we decided to prepare the soybean seed ferritin complex via a recombinant DNA approach. In this paper, we report a rapid and simple Escherichia coli expression system to produce the soybean seed ferritin complex. In this system, two subunits of soybean seed ferritin, H-2 and H-1, were encoded in a single plasmid, and optimal expression was achieved by additionally coexpressing a team of molecular chaperones, trigger factor and GroEL-GroES. The His-tagged ferritin complex was purified by $Ni^{2+}$ affinity chromatography, and an intact ferritin complex was obtained following His-tagged enterokinase (His-EK) digestion. The purified ferritin complex synthesized in E. coli demonstrated some reported features of its native counterpart from soybean seed, including an apparent molecular weight, multimeric assembly, and iron uptake activity. We believe that the strategy described in this paper may be of general utility in producing other recombinant plant ferritins built up from two types of subunits.

• Proceedings of the Botanical Society of Korea Conference
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• 1999.08a
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• pp.55-67
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• 1999

A puc -deleted cell of Rhodobacter sphaeroides grows with a doubling time longer than 160 h under the light-limiting photoheterotrophic ( 3 Watts [W]/㎡) conditions due to an absence of the peripheral light-harvesting B800-850 complex. A spontaneous fast-growing mutant, R.sphaeroides SK101 was ioslate dto have∼40-h doubling at 3 Watts/㎡, while the growth of the mutant was not distinguished from its parental strain during both aerobic and light-saturating photoheterotrphic (10W/㎡) growth. The B875 complex of SK101 under the light-limiting conditions was elevated by 20 to 30% compared with that of the puc -deleted cell, reflecting parallel increase of bacteriochlorophyll and carotenoid contents of the mutant. The formation of B875 complex of SK101 under the anaerobic dark conditions with dimethylsulfoxide was the same as that of the puc-deleted cell. suggesting that the mutation of SK101 result in the altered control of B875 complex formation by light. When puc is restored in SK101 , it is not B875 complex but B800-850 complex which formation is elevated. The mutation of SK101 affected the bchF transcription most drastically to show two to tenfold increase during both aerobic and photoheterotrophic growth. The mutated phenotype of SK101 was complemented with pW2, which contains approximately 100-kb HNA of the photosynthetic gene clusters. The complementing DNA was narrowed down to a 1.1-kb DNA containing orfQ and pufKBA . The mutation of SK101 appeared to be exerted through the mutation of the orfQ gene encoding a putative bacteriochlorophyll -mobilizing protein.

• Journal of Plant Biotechnology
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• v.4 no.3
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• pp.103-107
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• 2002

The Good Agriculture Practice (GAP) program, being established in China, is an optimal way for the sustainable utilization of the medicinal plant and animal resources. Most frequently used Chinese materia medica will be mainly produced from the GAP bases in the future. To assure the successful operation of GAP program, standard operating procedure (SOP) should be implemented for specific plants or animals. Both GAP and SOP include the requirements in many aspects from the ecological environment of cultivation place, germplasm and varieties, seedling and transplant, fertilization, irrigation, and field care, to harvest and process, package, transport and storage. As a complex system, GAP demands strong commitment from the pharmaceutical industry, local administrative involvement, long term R&D support, and years of time of development before a satisfactory result can be achieved.

• Journal of Korean Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.109-120
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• 2004

In large scale complex system such as a nuclear power plant, it is important to select guidelines and/or checklist to evaluate the system performance, especially human performance for visual information while the number of evaluation items of the guidelines and checklist is voluminous. This paper presents the methodology and experiment for the relative weights or priority selection of evaluation items on the advanced information display of main control room in a nuclear power plant. To summarize this, 1) many human factors guidelines of Visual Display Terminal(VDT) displays are collected, 2) the collected guidelines are integrated and unified based on some rules in a way to avoid confusion or errors about work performances of operator groups, 3) using the unified guidelines, the more important items are defined when the advanced information indexes are applied by using the Analytic Hierarchy Process(AHP). For employing the AHP, the decisions and response of many human factors evaluation specialists in this field are collected to get the priority order of the evaluation items of VDT. The result of this paper will be applied for the evaluation of the usability of next generation of nuclear power plant which is focused on the visual information display on VDT.

• Journal of Plant Biotechnology
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.73-78
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• 2000

The plastid genomes of several plants contain ndh genes homologues of genes encoding subunits of the mitochondrial complex I. We sequenced the part of lupin ndhB, ndhD and ndhF genes in order to compare the structure of these genes with those of Nicotiana tabaum, Arabidopsis thaliana, Zea mays and Oryza sativa with the idea to detect the presence of stretches with identical aminoacid composition. We were only able to find one or two stretches of this kind of about 16 aminoacid- long in the analyzed fragments of the ndh genes. The total number of such stretches was different in particular gene products: for ndhc 1, ndhB 9, ndhD 3 and ndhF 6. We have also examined the transcription pattern of ndhC, ndhK and ndhJ genes during lupin development. We show that the greatest amount of ndhC, ndhK and ndhJ transcripts are observed in 7- to 14 day- old lupin seedlings. We also studied the level of transcription of those genes in plants growing at low temperature. All the data confirmed that the abundance of transcription of ndhC, ndhK, and ndhJ genes increased under chill conditions. It has to be noted that the level of transcription of the ndhC gene was higher than the other genes probably due to higher stability of this transcript.

• Journal of Plant Biotechnology
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• v.39 no.1
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• pp.1-12
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• 2012

With the increasing advances in Brassicaceae genetics and genomics, considerable progress has been made in the transformation of Brassicaceae. Transformation technologies are now being exploited routinely to determine the gene function and contribute to the development of novel enhanced crops. $Agrobacterium$-mediated transformation remains the most widely used approach for the introduction of transgenes into Brassicaceae. In $Brassica$, the transformation relies mainly on $in$ $vitro$ transformation methods. Nevertheless, despite the significant progress made towards enhancing the transformation efficiencies, some genotypes remain recalcitrant to transformation. Advances in our understanding of the genetics behind various transformations have enabled researchers to identify more readily transformable genotypes for use in routine high-throughput systems. These developments have opened up exciting new avenues to exploit model $Brassica$ genotypes as resources for understanding the gene function in complex genomes. Although many other Brassicaceae have served as model species for improving plant transformation systems, this paper summarizes on the recent technologies employed in the transformation of both $Arabidopsis$ and $Brassica$. The use of transformation technologies for the introduction of desirable traits and a comparative analysis of these as well as their future prospects are also important parts of the current research that is reviewed.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.28 no.5
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• pp.431-439
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• 1996

In the process of simplifying the complex fate of the plant into a binary state, the information loss is inevitable. To minimize the information loss, the quantification of plant safety status has been formulated through the combination of the probability density function arising from the sensor measurement and the membership function representing the expectation of the state of the system. Therefore, in this context, the safety index is introduced in an attempt to quantify the plant status from the perspective of safety. The combination of probability density function and membership function is achieved through the integration of the fuzzy intersection of the two functions, and it often is not a simple task to integrate the fuzzy intersection due to the complexity that is the result of the fuzzy intersection. Therefore, a methodology based on the Algebra of Logic is used to express the fuzzy intersection and the fuzzy union of the arbitrary functions analytically. These exact analytical expressions are then numerically integrated by the application of Monte Carlo method. The benchmark tests for rectangular area and both fuzzy intersection and union of two normal distribution functions have been performed. Lastly, the safety index was determined for the Core Reactivity Control of Yonggwang 3&4 using the presented methodology.

• Journal of Environmental Science International
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• v.18 no.6
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• pp.603-608
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• 2009

Activated sludge sewage treatment processes are difficult to be controlled because of their complex and nonlinear behaviour, however, the control of the dissolved oxygen level in the reactors plays an important role in the operation of the facility. For this reason, this study is designed to present a system which accurately measures DO, MLSS, pH and ORP in the aeration tank to alleviate situations above and provide the automatization of a sewage treatment plant (STP) using new DO control system. The automatic control systems must be guaranteed the accuracy. Therefore, the proposed automatic DO control system in this study could be commercial applications in the aeration tanks by means of operating cost analysis and user-friendly for operation and maintenance. We could get accurate data from the lab tank which has water quality checker because there was no vortex and air bubble during the measurement process. Improvement of confidence in the lab tank enabled effective and automatic operation of sewage treatment plants so that operation costs and manpower could be saved. If this result is put in place in every sewage treatment plant nationwide for practical purposes, it is estimated to cost 18.5 million dollars in installing the lab tank and to save 9.8 million dollars in management cost a year, except for cost saved by automation.

• Carbon letters
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.161-166
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• 2012

Carbon materials were synthesized by pyrolysis from fibers of Corn-straw (Zea mays), Rice-straw (Oryza sativa), Jute-straw (Corchorus capsularis) Bamboo (Bombax bambusa), Bagass (Saccharum officinarum), Cotton (Bombax malabaricum), and Coconut (Cocos nucifera); these materials were characterized by scanning electron microscope, X-ray diffraction (XRD), and Raman spectra. All carbon materials are micro sized with large pores or channel like morphology. The unique complex spongy, porous and channel like structure of Carbon shows a lot of similarity with the original anatomy of the plant fibers used as precursor. Waxy contents like tyloses and pits present on fiber tracheids that were seen in the inherent anatomy disappear after pyrolysis and only the carbon skeleton remained; XRD analysis shows that carbon shows the development of a (002) plane, with the exception of carbon obtained from bamboo, which shows a very crystalline character. Raman studies of all carbon materials showed the presence of G- and D-bands of almost equal intensities, suggesting the presence of graphitic carbon as well as a disordered graphitic structure. Carbon materials possessing lesser density, larger surface area, more graphitic with less of an $sp^3$ carbon contribution, and having pore sizes around $10{\mu}m$ favor hydrogen adsorption. Carbon materials synthesized from bagass meet these requirements most effectively, followed by cotton fiber, which was more effective than the carbon synthesized from the other plant fibers.