• Microbiology and Biotechnology Letters
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• v.48 no.3
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• pp.373-382
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• 2020

Candidatus Carsonella ruddii is an endosymbiont that resides in specialized cells within the body cavity of plant sap-feeding insects called psyllids. The establishment of symbiotic associations is considered one of the key factors for the evolutionary success of psyllids, as it may have helped them adapt to imbalanced food resources like plant sap. Although C. ruddii is defined as a psyllid primary symbiont, the genes for some essential amino acid pathways are absent. Complete genome sequences of several C. ruddii strains have been published. However, in-depth intra-species comparison of C. ruddii strains has not yet been done. This study therefore aimed to perform a comparative genome analysis of six C. ruddii strains, allowing the interrogation of phylogenetic group, functional category of genes, and biosynthetic pathway analysis. Accordingly, overall genome size, number of genes, and GC content of C. ruddii strains were reduced. Phylogenetic analysis based on the whole genome proteomes of 30 related bacterial strains revealed that the six C. ruddii strains form a cluster in same clade. Biosynthetic pathway analysis showed that complete sets of genes for biosynthesis of essential amino acids, except tryptophan, are absent in six C. ruddii strains. All genes for tryptophan biosynthesis are present in three C. ruddii strains (BC, BT, and YCCR). It is likely that the host may depend on a secondary symbiont to complement its deficient diet. Overall, it is therefore possible that C. ruddii is being driven to extinction and replacement by new symbionts.

• Genomics & Informatics
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.28.1-28.9
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• 2020

Streptomyces coelicolor is a gram-positive soil bacterium which is well known for the production of several antibiotics used in various biotechnological applications. But numerous proteins from its genome are considered hypothetical proteins. Therefore, the present study aimed to reveal the functions of a hypothetical protein from the genome of S. coelicolor. Several bioinformatics tools were employed to predict the structure and function of this protein. Sequence similarity was searched through the available bioinformatics databases to find out the homologous protein. The secondary and tertiary structure were predicted and further validated with quality assessment tools. Furthermore, the active site and the interacting proteins were also explored with the utilization of CASTp and STRING server. The hypothetical protein showed the important biological activity having with two functional domain including POD-like_MBL-fold and rhodanese homology domain. The functional annotation exposed that the selected hypothetical protein could show the hydrolase activity. Furthermore, protein-protein interactions of selected hypothetical protein revealed several functional partners those have the significant role for the bacterial survival. At last, the current study depicts that the annotated hypothetical protein is linked with hydrolase activity which might be of great interest to the further research in bacterial genetics.

• Journal of Microbiology and Biotechnology
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• v.33 no.5
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• pp.687-697
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• 2023

Identification of novel, electricity-producing bacteria has garnered remarkable interest because of the various applications of electricigens in microbial fuel cell and bioelectrochemical systems. Shewanella marisflavi BBL25, an electricity-generating microorganism, uses various carbon sources and shows broader sugar utilization than the better-known S. oneidensis MR-1. To determine the sugar-utilizing genes and electricity production and transfer system in S. marisflavi BBL25, we performed an in-depth analysis using whole-genome sequencing. We identified various genes associated with carbon source utilization and the electron transfer system, similar to those of S. oneidensis MR-1. In addition, we identified genes related to hydrogen production systems in S. marisflavi BBL25, which were different from those in S. oneidensis MR-1. When we cultured S. marisflavi BBL25 under anaerobic conditions, the strain produced 427.58 ± 5.85 µl of biohydrogen from pyruvate and 877.43 ± 28.53 µl from xylose. As S. oneidensis MR-1 could not utilize glucose well, we introduced the glk gene from S. marisflavi BBL25 into S. oneidensis MR-1, resulting in a 117.35% increase in growth and a 17.64% increase in glucose consumption. The results of S. marisflavi BBL25 genome sequencing aided in the understanding of sugar utilization, electron transfer systems, and hydrogen production systems in other Shewanella species.

• Proceedings of the Botanical Society of Korea Conference
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• 1998.07a
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• pp.61-70
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• 1998

Genome and chromosome analyses in plants using fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) and immuno-staining (IMS) methods are reviewed by presenting the recent results obtained by the Chromosome Link, a group of chromosome and genome researchers. FISH is now effective to detect unique nucleotide sequences with 153 bp on the extended DNA fibers. Genomic in situ hybridization (GISH) also allows painting plant chromosomes of different genomes. GISH is quite effective to detect the genomic differentiation in the individual chromosomes within a nucleus. Three dimensional (3D) analyses are now available by confocal microscopy and a deconvolution system. These techniques are invaluable to visualize both the structural and functional dynamics within a nucleus. 3D-FISH revealed the spatial differentiation of different genomees within a nucleus. 3D-FISH also proved structural partition of centromeric and telomeric domains within a barely nucleus. The dynamic acetylation of histone H4 at the specific regions of a genome during a cell cycle is also analyzed using 3D-IMS. It is anticipated that these methods will provide us powerful tools to understand the structural and functional significance of plant chromosomes and genomes.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2002.07c
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• pp.1788-1791
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• 2002

In the post-genome era. it is one of important research subject to Investigate the roles of the proteins in human body based on decoded genome information during Human Genome Project. In order to clarify them. it is necessary to analyze the structure of the protein crystals and their function. ' Crystallization is the beginning stage of protein structure determination process. There are some methods for structural analysis of the proteins, and general one is X-ray structural analysis method. In order to utilize this method for analyzing the protein crystal's structure, artificial protein crystallization is required. However, since artificial crystallizing work takes much time and manpower. the performance against its cost is still low. Therefore. we started to discuss to develop a supporting system for improving efficiency of the crystallization distinction procedure. In this paper, we examine to realize such supporting system for crystallization distinction using image-processing technique and report about our experimental result with many real protein solution images.

• BMB Reports
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• v.57 no.1
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• pp.2-11
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• 2024

Advancements in gene and cell therapy have resulted in novel therapeutics for diseases previously considered incurable or challenging to treat. Among the various contributing technologies, genome editing stands out as one of the most crucial for the progress in gene and cell therapy. The discovery of CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) and the subsequent evolution of genetic engineering technology have markedly expanded the field of target-specific gene editing. Originally studied in the immune systems of bacteria and archaea, the CRISPR system has demonstrated wide applicability to effective genome editing of various biological systems including human cells. The development of CRISPR-based base editing has enabled directional cytosine-to-thymine and adenine-to-guanine substitutions of select DNA bases at the target locus. Subsequent advances in prime editing further elevated the flexibility of the edit multiple consecutive bases to desired sequences. The recent CRISPR technologies also have been actively utilized for the development of in vivo and ex vivo gene and cell therapies. We anticipate that the medical applications of CRISPR will rapidly progress to provide unprecedented possibilities to develop novel therapeutics towards various diseases.

• Microbiology and Biotechnology Letters
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• v.52 no.2
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• pp.141-151
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• 2024

Isochrysis sp. is a sea microalga that has become a species of interest because of the extreme lipid content and rapid growth rate of this organism indicating its potential for efficient biofuel production. Using genome sequencing/genome-scale modeling for the prediction of Isochrysis sp. metabolic utilities there is high scope for the identification of essential pathways for the extraction of byproducts of interest at a higher rate. In our work, we design and present iIsochr964, a genome-scale metabolic model of Isochrysis sp. including 4315 reactions, 934 genes, and 1879 metabolites, which are distributed among fourteen compartments. For model validation, experimental culture, and isolation of Isochrysis sp. were performed and biomass values were used for validation of the genome-scale model. OptFlux was instrumental in uncovering several novel metabolites that influence the organism's metabolism by increasing the flux of interacting metabolites, such as Malonyl-CoA, EPA, Protein and others. iIsochr964 provides a compelling resource of metabolic understanding to revolutionize its industrial applications, thereby fostering sustainable development and allowing estimations and simulations of the organism metabolism under varying physiological, chemical, and genetic conditions. It is also useful in principle to provide a systemic view of Isochrysis sp. metabolism, efficiently guiding research and granting context to omics data.

• Journal of the Korean institute of surface engineering
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• v.50 no.1
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• pp.1-9
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• 2017

Design of novel materials in renewable energy systems plays a key role in powering transportation vehicles and portable electronics. This review introduces the research work of first principles-based computational design for the materials over the last decade to accomplish the goal with less financial and temporal cost beyond the conventional approach, especially, focusing on electrocatalyst toward a proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC). It is proposed that the new method combined with experimental validation, can provide fundamental descriptors and mechanical understanding for optimal efficiency control of a whole system. Advancing these methods can even realize a computational platform of the materials genome, which can substantially reduce the time period from discovery to commercialization into markets of new materials.

• Korean Journal of Microbiology
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• v.54 no.1
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• pp.77-78
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• 2018

Staphylococcus aureus is a Gram-positive and a round-shaped bacterium of Firmicutes phylum, and is a common cause of skin infections, respiratory infections, and food poisoning. Bacteriophages infecting S. aureus can be an effective treatment for S. aureus infections. Here, the draft genomic sequence is announced for a lytic bacteriophage SA7 infecting S. aureus isolates. The bacteriophage SA7 was isolated from a sewage water sample near a livestock farm in Chungcheongnam-do, South Korea. SA7 has a genome of 34,730 bp and 34.1% G + C content. The genome has 53 protein-coding genes, 23 of which have predicted functions from BLASTp analysis, leaving the others conserved proteins with unknown function.

• Journal of Microbiology and Biotechnology
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• v.16 no.5
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• pp.748-756
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• 2006

We propose a genome-scale clustering approach to identify whole genome relationships using the functional groups given by the Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes Orthology (KO) database. The metabolic capabilities of each organism were defined by the number of genes in each functional category. The archaeal, bacterial, and eukaryotic genomes were compared by simultaneously applying a two-step clustering method, comprised of a self-organizing tree algorithm followed by unsupervised hierarchical clustering. The clustering results were consistent with various phenotypic characteristics of the organisms analyzed and, additionally, showed a different aspect of the relationship between genomes that have previously been established through rRNA-based comparisons. The proposed approach to collect and cluster the metabolic functional capabilities of organisms should make it a useful tool in predicting relationships among organisms.