• Asian-Australasian Journal of Animal Sciences
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• v.28 no.5
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• pp.620-631
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• 2015

A total of 59 lactic acid bacteria (LAB) strains were isolated from corn stover silage. According to phenotypic and chemotaxonomic characteristics, 16S ribosomal DNA (rDNA) sequences and recA gene polymerase chain reaction amplification, these LAB isolates were identified as five species: Lactobacillus (L.) plantarum subsp. plantarum, Pediococcus pentosaceus, Enterococcus mundtii, Weissella cibaria and Leuconostoc pseudomesenteroides, respectively. Those strains were also screened for antimicrobial activity using a dual-culture agar plate assay. Based on excluding the effects of organic acids and hydrogen peroxide, two L. plantarum subsp. plantarum strains ZZU 203 and 204, which strongly inhibited Salmonella enterica ATCC $43971^T$, Micrococcus luteus ATCC $4698^T$ and Escherichia coli ATCC $11775^T$ were selected for further research on sensitivity of the antimicrobial substance to heat, pH and protease. Cell-free culture supernatants of the two strains exhibited strong heat stability (60 min at $100^{\circ}C$), but the antimicrobial activity was eliminated after treatment at $121^{\circ}C$ for 15 min. The antimicrobial substance remained active under acidic condition (pH 2.0 to 6.0), but became inactive under neutral and alkaline condition (pH 7.0 to 9.0). In addition, the antimicrobial activities of these two strains decreased remarkably after digestion by protease K. These results preliminarily suggest that the desirable antimicrobial activity of strains ZZU 203 and 204 is the result of the production of a bacteriocin-like substance, and these two strains with antimicrobial activity could be used as silage additives to inhibit proliferation of unwanted microorganism during ensiling and preserve nutrients of silage. The nature of the antimicrobial substances is being investigated in our laboratory.

• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
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• v.14 no.9
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• pp.4961-4964
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• 2013

Greater use of mobile phone devices seems inevitable because the health industry and cancer care are facing challenges such as resource constraints, rising care costs, the need for immediate access to healthcare data of types such as audio video texts for early detection and treatment of patients and increasing remote aids in telemedicine. Physicians, in order to study the causes of cancer, detect cancer earlier, act in prevention measures, determine the effectiveness of treatment and specify the reasons for the treatment ineffectiveness, need to access accurate, comprehensive and timely cancer data. Mobile devices provide opportunities and can play an important role in consulting, diagnosis, treatment, and quick access to health information. There easy carriage make them perfect tools for healthcare providers in cancer care management. Key factors in cancer care management systems through a mobile phone health approach must be considered such as human resources, confidentiality and privacy, legal and ethical issues, appropriate ICT and provider infrastructure and costs in general aspects and interoperability, human relationships, types of mobile devices and telecommunication related points in specific aspects. The successful implementation of mobile-based systems in cancer care management will constantly face many challenges. Hence, in applying mobile cancer care, involvement of users and considering their needs in all phases of project, providing adequate bandwidth, preparation of standard tools that provide maximum mobility and flexibility for users, decreasing obstacles to interrupt network communications, and using suitable communication protocols are essential. It is obvious that identifying and reducing barriers and strengthening the positive points will have a significant role in appropriate planning and promoting the achievements of mobile cancer care systems. The aim of this article is to explain key points which should be considered in designing appropriate mobile health systems in cancer care as an approach for improving cancer care management.

• Journal of Microbiology and Biotechnology
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.65-71
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• 2009

Microbial oxidoreductive systems have been widely used in asymmetric syntheses of optically active alcohols. However, when reused in multi-batch reaction, the catalytic efficiency and sustainability of non-growing cells usually decreased because of continuous consumption of required cofactors during the reaction process. A novel method for NADPH regeneration in cells was proposed by using pentose metabolism in microorganisms. Addition of D-xylose, L-arabinose, or D-ribose to the reaction significantly improved the conversion efficiency of deracemization of racemic 1-phenyl-1,2-ethanediol to (S)-isomer by Candida parapsilosis cells already used once, which afforded the product with high optical purity over 97%e.e. in high yield over 85% under an increased substrate concentration of 15 g/l. Compared with reactions without xylose, xylose added to multi-batch reactions had no influence on the activity of the enzyme catalyzing the key step in deracemization, but performed a promoting effect on the recovery of the metabolic activity of the non-growing cells with its consumption in each batch. The detection of activities of xylose reductase and xylitol dehydrogenase from cell-free extract of C. parapsilosis made xylose metabolism feasible in cells, and the depression of the pentose phosphate pathway inhibitor to this reaction further indicated that xylose facilitated the NADPH-required deracemization through the pentose phosphate pathway in C. parapsilosis. moreover, by investigating the cofactor pool, the xylose addition in reaction batches giving more NADPH, compared with those without xylose, suggested that the higher catalytic efficiency and sustainability of C. parapsilosis non-growing cells had resulted from xylose metabolism recycling NADPH for the deracemization.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.11 no.9
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• pp.4491-4509
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• 2017

The present paper proposes a novel dynamic system for hand gesture recognition. The approach involved is comprised of three main steps: detection, tracking and recognition. First, the gesture contour captured by a 2D-camera is detected by combining the three-frame difference method and skin-color elliptic boundary model. Then, the trajectory of the hand gesture is extracted via a gesture-tracking algorithm based on an occlusion-direction oriented linear extrapolation predictor, where the gesture coordinate in next frame is predicted by the judgment of current occlusion direction. Finally, to overcome the interference of insignificant trajectory segments, the longest common subsequence (LCS) is employed with the aid of velocity information. Besides, to tackle the subgesture problem, i.e., some gestures may also be a part of others, the most probable gesture category is identified through comparison of the relative LCS length of each gesture, i.e., the proportion between the LCS length and the total length of each template, rather than the length of LCS for each gesture. The gesture dataset for system performance test contains digits ranged from 0 to 9, and experimental results demonstrate the robustness and effectiveness of the proposed approach.

• Bulletin of the Korean Chemical Society
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• v.29 no.5
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• pp.915-920
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• 2008

In this paper the electrochemical behaviors of hydroquinone ($H_2Q$) were investigated on a carbon paste electrode using room temperature ionic liquid N-butylpyridinium hexafluorophosphate ($BPPF_6$) as binder (ILCPE) and further applied to $H_2Q$ determination. In pH 2.5 phosphate buffer solution (PBS), the electrochemical response of H2Q was greatly improved on the IL-CPE with a pair of well-defined quasi-reversible redox peaks appeared, which was attributed to the electrocatalytic activity of IL-CPE to the $H_2Q$. The redox peak potentials were located at 0.340 V (Epa) and 0.240 V (Epc) (vs. the saturated calomel electrode, SCE), respectively. The formal potential ($E^0$') was calculated as 0.290 V and the peak-to-peak separation (${\Delta}E_p$) was 0.100 V. The electrochemical parameters of $H_2Q$ on the IL-CPE were further calculated by cyclic voltammetry. Under the selected conditions the anodic peak current was linear with $H_2Q$ concentration over the range from $5.0\;{{\times}}\;10^{-6}$ to $5.0\;{\times}\;10^{-3}\;mol\;L^{-1}$ with the detection limit as $2.5\;{\times}\;10^{-6}\;mol\;L^{-1}$ (3$\sigma$ ) by cyclic voltammetry. The proposed method was successful applied to determination of $H_2Q$ content in a synthetic wastewater sample without the interferences of commonly coexisting substances.

• Bulletin of the Korean Chemical Society
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• v.29 no.5
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• pp.928-932
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• 2008

A glassy carbon electrode (GCE) modified with poly(p-aminobenzene sulfonic acid) [Poly(p-ABSA)] film is fabricated by voltammetric technique in phosphate buffer solution (pH 8.0) containing $5.0\;{\times}\;10^{-3}\;mol\;L^{-1}$p- ABSA. Electrochemical behaviors of tryptophan at the Poly(p-ABSA) film electrode are investigated with voltammetry. The results indicate that the electrochemical response of tryptophan is improved significantly in the presence of poly(p-ABSA) film. Compared with the bare glassy carbon electrode, the Poly(p-ABSA) film electrode remarkably enhances the irreversible oxidation peak current of tryptophan. Some parameters such as voltammetric sweeping segments for the electrochemical polymerization, pH, accumulation potential and accumulation time are optimized. Under the optimal conditions, the oxidation peak current is proportional to tryptophan concentration in the range of $1.0\;{\times}\;10^{-7}$ to $1.0\;{\times}\;10^{-6}\;mol\;L^{-1}$, and $2.0\;{\times}\;10^{-6}$ to $1.0\;{\times}\;10^{-5}\;mol\;L^{-1}$ with a detection limit of $7.0\;{\times}\;10^{-8}\;mol\;L^{-1}$. The proposed procedure is successfully applied to the determination of tryptophan in a commercial amino acid oral solution.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.26 no.3
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• pp.345-360
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• 2020

Modern swarm intelligence heuristic search methods are widely applied in the field of structural health monitoring due to their advantages of excellent global search capacity, loose requirement of initial guess and ease of computational implementation etc. To this end, a hybrid strategy is proposed based on butterfly optimization algorithm (BOA) and differential evolution (DE) with purpose of effective combination of their merits. In the proposed identification strategy, two improvements including mutation and crossover operations of DE, and dynamic adaptive operators are introduced into original BOA to reduce the risk to be trapped in local optimum and increase global search capability. The performance of the proposed algorithm, hybrid butterfly optimization and differential evolution algorithm (HBODEA) is evaluated by two numerical examples of a simply supported beam and a 37-bar truss structure, as well as an experimental test of 8-story shear-type steel frame structure in the laboratory. Compared with BOA and DE, the numerical and experimental results show that the proposed HBODEA is more robust to detect the reduction of stiffness with limited sensors and contaminated measurements. In addition, the effect of search space, two dynamic operators, population size on identification accuracy and efficiency of the proposed identification strategy are further investigated.

• Parasites, Hosts and Diseases
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• v.58 no.2
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• pp.173-179
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• 2020

Leishmaniasis is a prevalent cause of death and animal morbidity in underdeveloped countries of endemic area. However, there is few vaccine and effective drugs. Antimicrobial peptides are involved in the innate immune response in many organisms and are being developed as novel drugs against parasitic infections. In the present study, we synthesized a 5-amino acid peptide REDLK, which mutated the C-terminus of Pseudomonas exotoxin, to identify its effect on the Leishmania tarentolae. Promastigotes were incubated with different concentration of REDLK peptide, and the viability of parasite was assessed using MTT and Trypan blue dye. Morphologic damage of Leishmania was analyzed by light and electron microscopy. Cellular apoptosis was observed using the annexin V-FITC/PI apoptosis detection kit, mitochondrial membrane potential assay kit and flow cytometry. Our results showed that Leishmania tarentolae was susceptible to REDLK in a dose-dependent manner, disrupt the surface membrane integrity and caused parasite apoptosis. In our study, we demonstrated the leishmanicidal activity of an antimicrobial peptide REDLK from Pseudomonas aeruginosa against Leishmania tarentolae in vitro and present a foundation for further research of anti-leishmanial drugs.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.6 no.12
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• pp.3315-3337
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• 2012

Crowded scenes analysis is a challenging topic in computer vision field. How to detect diverse motion patterns in crowded scenarios from videos is the critical yet hard part of this problem. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to mining motion patterns by utilizing motion information during both long-term period and short interval simultaneously. To capture long-term motions effectively, we introduce Motion History Image (MHI) representation to access to the global perspective about the crowd motion. The combination of MHI and optical flow, which is used to get instant motion information, gives rise to discriminative spatial-temporal motion features. Benefitting from the robustness and efficiency of the novel motion representation, the following motion pattern mining is implemented in a completely unsupervised way. The motion vectors are clustered hierarchically through automatic hierarchical clustering algorithm building on the basis of graphic model. This method overcomes the instability of optical flow in dealing with time continuity in crowded scenes. The results of clustering reveal the situations of motion pattern distribution in current crowded videos. To validate the performance of the proposed approach, we conduct experimental evaluations on some challenging videos including vehicles and pedestrians. The reliable detection results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.14 no.6
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• pp.51-57
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• 2009

Wireless sensor networks consist of numerous sensor nodes that have inexpensive and limited resources. Generally, most of the sensors are assigned to the hazardous or uncontrollable environments. If the sensor nodes are randomly assigned to the wide target area, it is very hard to see the accurate locations of sensor nodes. Therefore, this study provides an efficient key distribution scheme to solve these problems. Based on the provided scheme, the study enabled the closely neighboring nodes to exchange information with each other after securing safe links by using the pre-distributed keys. At the same time, the provided scheme could increase the probability of multiparty key detection among nodes by using the location information of sensor node. Lastly, the study intended to show the superiority of the limitation method through a performance test.