• The Plant Pathology Journal
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• v.38 no.4
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• pp.304-312
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• 2022

Boxwood is a representative ornamental shrub that is widely used in landscaping horticulture. After pruning, damaged leaves or stems of boxwoods are unavoidably vulnerable to infection by various plant pathogens. Several boxwood diseases caused by fungi, such as Volutella blight and Macrophoma leaf spot, have been reported worldwide including Republic of Korea. In this study, we isolated and identified fungal pathogens of boxwood diseases that occurred in Korea and characterized their morphological and taxonomic characteristics. Boxwood samples showing blight symptoms were collected in Seoul, Republic of Korea, and the putative fungal pathogens Pseudonectria buxi, P. foliicola, and Neofusicoccum buxi were successfully identified. Investigation of the morphological features of the field isolates, including mycelial growth and conidial morphology, and phylogenetic analysis of multiple DNA barcode loci revealed that there were some morphological and genetic variations among isolates, but all of the analyzed isolates were closely related to the corresponding reference strains. We also found that P. foliicola strains were more virulent than P. buxi, and the N. buxi strains isolated in this study were weak pathogens or saprophytes. The results of our study will contribute to the development of control strategies for boxwood diseases caused by fungi and accelerate research on the complex ecology of boxwood diseases.

• Korean Journal of Ichthyology
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• v.34 no.1
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• pp.1-7
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• 2022

A larva of the deep-sea angler fish, Himantolophus groenlandicus (2.2 mm BL), identified based on the complete mitochondrial DNA sequence, was collected at the surface of the western North Pacific. The postflexion stage larva had a round body, small teeth, incipient dorsal fin rays, eyes slightly recessed in the lower part, and melanophores on the gills and parietal and dorsal regions. These morphological features differ from a description of a larva reported as the same species with similar size (2.1 mm BL). The genetic and morphological information of our specimen should be useful for identifying larval H. groenlandicus.

• ALGAE
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• v.37 no.1
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• pp.15-32
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• 2022

Inspecting herbaria collections of Laurencia rigida highlighted frequent misidentifications between L. rigida and L. heteroclada f. decussata, two poorly studied taxa from Australia. Recent collections of DNA material, including from topotype material, allowed for re-examination of these two taxa using molecular techniques. Detailed morphological and molecular analyses based on two markers (rbcL and COI-5P) strongly supported these two taxa as being distinct from each other and requiring nomenclatural changes. Comprehensive morphological analyses highlighted features useful for accurate identifications. Interestingly, L. rigida was found to belong to the genus Palisada with evidence from both the morphology and molecular data. Therefore, this study proposed recognizing L. rigida as Palisada rigida comb. nov. Molecular data for L. heteroclada f. decussata on the other hand supported its separation from L. heteroclada, with too great a molecular distance to be considered a variety. Morphological characters that best separated P. rigida from L. decussata included seven characters; number of pericentral cells per vegetative axial segment, the presence of secondary pit connections, the presence of lenticular thickenings, tetrasporangia alignment, the presence of corps en cerise, holdfast morphology, and overall plant shape. Morphologically, L. heteroclada f. decussata was also separated from L. heteroclada, particularly by the following characteristics; ultimate branchlets morphologies, lower order branch lengths, primary axis and holdfast morphologies. Therefore, it was proposed that L. heteroclada f. decussata is recognized at a species level as L. decussata comb. et stat. nov.

• Korean Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences
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• v.56 no.6
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• pp.916-922
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• 2023

An abnormal shape of Bathyraja brachyurops was first reported from the catch of a bottom trawl in the southwest Atlantic Ocean in June 2022. Both pectoral fins of the specimen did not fuse with the head, resulting in a horn-like structure separated from the sides of the eyes. Analysis of mitochondrial DNA cytochrome c oxidase subunit I sequences showed that our specimen was perfectly matched to Bathyraja brachyurops registered with the National Center for Biotechnology Information. Our specimen possessed the following morphological features: a pair of flexible but elongated and pointed horns on the head; rough dorsal disc, densely covered with numerous small denticles on the head, anterior margin of pectoral fins and median line of the disc; a thorn between the first and second dorsal fins; and a pair of large ocelli at the base of pectoral fins. Unlike the normal B. brachyurops, our specimen had a slender clasper and no nuchal thorns, which may be related to the morphological abnormality. The horn-like structure on the head may be owing to the lack of fusion between the pectoral fins and head during early embryonic development.

• Archives of Craniofacial Surgery
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.123-126
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• 2020

Skin cancer, which often occurs as a result of skin exposure to ultraviolet light radiation, usually presents with characteristic abnormal features, such as ulcerative lesions, irregular morphology, bleeding, and excessive growth. Therefore, skin cancer rarely resembles a benign tumor on visual inspection. Nonetheless, squamous cell carcinoma and basal cell carcinoma with nodular or polypoid features can have a similar appearance to that of benign tumors, meaning that they are sometimes misdiagnosed as benign. As benign and malignant tumors have some overlapping features, clinicians sometimes use additional imaging techniques such as ultrasonography to improve the accuracy of the diagnosis because even a malignant tumor that externally resembles a benign tumor generally has internal morphological features characteristic of malignancy, such as invasion and irregular borders. However, these imaging tools also have limitations, and punch or excisional biopsy can be needed if malignancy cannot be completely ruled out. Herein, we report a case of skin malignancy initially misdiagnosed as a benign epidermal cyst based on external visual inspection and ultrasonography.

• Research in Plant Disease
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.308-312
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• 2013

The popcorn disease caused by sclerotia forming fungi reduces the productivity of mulberry fruits in world wide. In Korea, only two species (Ciboria shiraiana and Scleromitrula shiraiana) have been reported as the major causal organisms and their morphological features are also largely unknown. Hereby, we report the first identification of another species (i.e. Ciboria carunculoides) in Korea and detailed features of their anamorphic stage. Fungi dominantly associated with sclerotia were purely isolated from infected mulberry fruits under the microscope. PCR-amplified DNA encoding 5.8S rRNA displayed 100% similarity to Ciboria carunculoides. The anamorphic features exhibited the absence of true mycelia. Instead, very short, aseptated, branched conidiophores were directly emerged from sclerotia. Phialides were usually three in number from each conidiophore, ampuliform to navicular in shape, slightly curved and tapering towards the apex. Conidia were produced from phialides and mostly found as one celled, pear shaped, not hyaline with smooth to uneven surface walled. Diversely modified features in phialides formed pseudo-mycelial structures around the host tissue. Combined all, current study is the first report of C. carunculoides isolated in Korea and the foremost detailed description of its anamorph stage.

• Journal of the Korean Association of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons
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• v.35 no.4
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• pp.199-204
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• 2009

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to investigate the epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) induced by Snail transcription factor and Snail-transfected in vivo tumors with histopathological features. Materials and methods: We induced in vivo xenografted tumorigenesis in the oral vestibules of nude mice by a Snail transfected HaCaT cell line and investigated morphological and immunohistochemical features in Snail expressive tumors. Results: We identified tumor masses in 14 out of 15 nude mice in the HaCaT-Snail cell inoculation group, but no tumors were present in any of the HaCaT cell inoculation group. Induced tumors showed features of poorly differentiated carcinoma with invasion to neighboring muscles and bones. The HaCaT-Snail tumors showed decreased expressions of E-cadherin and cytokeratin, but showed increased expressions of vimentin and N-cadherin. Discussion: The Snail transfected xenograft can improve productivity of malignant tumors, show various histopathological features including invasive growth, and aid in the investigation of tumor progression and the interaction with surrounding tissues.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.892-903
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• 2018

The paper proposes a novel gait recognition algorithm based on feature fusion of gait energy image (GEI) dynamic region and Gabor, which consists of four steps. First, the gait contour images are extracted through the object detection, binarization and morphological process. Secondly, features of GEI at different angles and Gabor features with multiple orientations are extracted from the dynamic part of GEI, respectively. Then averaging method is adopted to fuse features of GEI dynamic region with features of Gabor wavelets on feature layer and the feature space dimension is reduced by an improved Kernel Principal Component Analysis (KPCA). Finally, the vectors of feature fusion are input into the support vector machine (SVM) based on multi classification to realize the classification and recognition of gait. The primary contributions of the paper are: a novel gait recognition algorithm based on based on feature fusion of GEI and Gabor is proposed; an improved KPCA method is used to reduce the feature matrix dimension; a SVM is employed to identify the gait sequences. The experimental results suggest that the proposed algorithm yields over 90% of correct classification rate, which testify that the method can identify better different human gait and get better recognized effect than other existing algorithms.

• ALGAE
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.191-199
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• 2004

Morphological and phonological characteristics of brown alga Spatoglossum crassum Tanaka new to Korea were described based on the field and the indoor cultured plants. The taxonomic characteristics of the plants were agreed to those from the type locality-submerged reproductive organs in cortex, anatomical features, and absence of phaeophycean hairs on the surface. But they have rudimentary midrib on lower portion of thallus. We can observe the young plants on November, adult ones in June, and senile ones in August. This species has an annual life-cycle in the field, starting with germ lings in early November. The differentiation of thallus is quite different from other species of genera in tribe Zonarieae, e.g. Zonaria and Homoeostrichus. Three different tissues, meristoderm, cortex and medulla are discerned. The outmost cortical one celled layer as a meristoderm produce cortex by unequal periclinal division. In the apical cell division, the primary inner cells are developed into 3-4 cell layered medulla of thallus. The distribution of this species extends from Korea to Shizuoka Peninsula (34°40'N) Japan, which is the type locality of this species.

• ALGAE
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• v.26 no.3
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• pp.221-227
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• 2011

There are three carpet-like Codium species with a broadly expanded thallus reported from Korea and Japan: C. latum Suringar, C. tapetum Y. Lee, and C. tenuifolium Shimada, Tadano and J. Tanaka. During surveys of green algal diversity, we encountered a Codium species with carpet-like thalli from several sites on Jeju Island. To confirm the taxonomic identity of these specimens, we studied the morphological features and obtained rbcL gene sequences. The morphological and sequence data indicated that the carpet-like Codium specimens from Jeju are C. tenuifolium from Japan, but distant from Japanese C. latum. We propose that the carpet-like specimens from Jeju should be renamed C. tenuifolium, instead of C. tapetum or C. latum. C. tenuifolium is characterized by a tenuous, carpet-like and erect thallus with a very short and slightly compressed stipe arising from a discal holdfast, sub-pyriform and clavate utricles with a tumid and swollen apical head, and globular or sub-globular gametangia issued at the basal portion of the utricles.