• Microbiology and Biotechnology Letters
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• v.43 no.3
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• pp.219-226
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• 2015

Acetic acid bacteria (AAB) were isolated from vinegar fermented through traditional methods in Namhae county, Gyeongnam, the Republic of Korea. The isolated strains were Gram negative, non-motile, and short-rods. Three selected strains were identified as either Acetobacter pasteurianus or Acetobacter aceti by 16S rRNA gene sequencing. A. pasteurianus NH2 and A. pasteurianus NH6 utilized ethanol, glycerol, D-fructose, D-glucose, D-mannitol, D-sorbitol, L-glutamic acid and Na-acetate. A. aceti NH12 utilized ethanol, n-propanol, glycerol, D-mannitol and Na-acetate. These strains grew best at 30℃ and an initial pH of 3.4. They were tolerant against acetic acid at up to 3% of initial concentration (v/v). The optimum conditions for acetic acid production were 30℃ and pH 3.4, with an initial ethanol concentration of 5%, resulting in an acetic acid concentration of 7.3−7.7%.

• Korean Journal of Veterinary Service
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.493-496
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• 2008

Brucella spp. are small, non-motile Gram-negative coccobacilli known to cause disease in a number of vertebrate species including humans and brucellosis is one of the world's major zoonoses, alongside bovine tuberculosis and rabies. There are about 33.55 million goats and 1.16 million sheep in Bangladesh. The sheep and goats can significantly play an important role in the economic well being of the resource-poor farmer in Bangladesh. Sexually matured 362 female small ruminants(300 goats and 62 sheep) were examined. Approximately 3-5 ml of blood was collected from the jugular vein of each animal and sera samples were prepared. Samples were then tested for brucellosis by using Rose Bengal test(RBT), plate agglutination test(PAT) and tube agglutination test(TAT). Among 362 small ruminants, irrespective of species(sheep or goat), diagnosed highest in TAT, 2.21%(n=8) and lowest both by RBT & PAT, 1.93%(n=7) and it is concluded that TAT is superior than RBT and PAT.

• Journal of Microbiology and Biotechnology
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• v.25 no.11
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• pp.1908-1919
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• 2015

This work investigated the potential of curcumin (CCM) and (-)-epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG) to inhibit N-acyl homoserine lactone (AHL)-mediated biofilm formation in gram-negative bacteria from membrane bioreactor (MBR) activated sludge. The minimum inhibitory concentrations (MICs) of CCM alone against all the tested bacteria were 200-350 μg/ml, whereas those for EGCG were 300-600 μg/ml. Biofilm formation at one-half MICs indicated that CCM and EGCG alone respectively inhibited 52-68% and 59-78% of biofilm formation among all the tested bacteria. However, their combination resulted in 95-99% of biofilm reduction. Quorum sensing inhibition (QSI) assay with known biosensor strains demonstrated that CCM inhibited the expression of C4 and C6 homoserine lactones (HSLs)-mediated phenotypes, whereas EGCG inhibited C4, C6, and C10 HSLs-based phenotypes. The Center for Disease Control biofilm reactor containing a multispecies culture of nine bacteria with one-half MIC of CCM (150 μg/ml) and EGCG (275 μg/ml) showed 17 and 14 μg/cm² of extracellular polymeric substances (EPS) on polyvinylidene fluoride membrane surface, whereas their combination (100 μg/ml of each) exhibited much lower EPS content (3 μg/cm²). Confocal laser scanning microscopy observations also illustrated that the combination of compounds tremendously reduced the biofilm thickness. The combined effect of CCM with EGCG clearly reveals for the first time the enhanced inhibition of AHL-mediated biofilm formation in bacteria from activated sludge. Thus, such combined natural QSI approach could be used for the inhibition of membrane biofouling in MBRs treating wastewaters.

• Journal of Microbiology and Biotechnology
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.219-227
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• 2008

The free-living photoheterotrophic Gram-negative bacterium Rhodobacter sphaeroides possesses a quorum-sensing (QS) regulatory system mediated by CerR-CerI, a member of the LuxR-LuxI family. To identify the genes affected by the regulatory system, random lacZ fusions were generated in the genome of R. sphaeroides strain 2.4.1 using a promoter-trapping vector, pSG2. About 20,000 clones were screened and 23 showed a significantly different level of ${\beta}$-gal activities upon the addition of synthetic 7,8-cis-N-tetradecenoyl-homoserine lactone (RAI). Among these 23 clones, the clone showing the highest level of induction was selected for further study, where about a ten-fold increase of ${\beta}$-gal activity was exhibited in the presence of RAI and induction was shown to be required for cerR. In this clone, the lacZ reporter was inserted in a putative gene that exhibited a low homology with catD. A genetic analysis showed that the expression of the catD homolog was initiated from a promoter of another gene present upstream of the catD. This upstream gene showed a strong homology with luxR and hence was named qsrR (quorum-sensing regulation regulator). A comparison of the total protein expression profiles for the wild-type cells and qsrR-null mutant cells using two-dimensional gel electrophoresis and a MALDI-TOF analysis allowed the identification of sets of genes modulated by the luxR homolog.

• Journal of Microbiology and Biotechnology
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• v.20 no.7
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• pp.1061-1068
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• 2010

The biological synthesis of nanoparticles has gained considerable attention in view of their excellent biocompatibility and low toxicity. We isolated and purified rhamnolipids from Pseudomonas aeruginosa strain BS-161R, and these purified rhamnolipids were used to synthesize silver nanoparticles. The purified rhamnolipids were further characterized and the structure was elucidated based on one- and two-dimensional $^1H$ and $^{13}C$ NMR, FT-IR, and HR-MS spectral data. Purified rhamnolipids in a pseudoternary system of n-heptane and water system along with n-butanol as a cosurfactant were added to the aqueous solutions of silver nitrate and sodium borohydride to form reverse micelles. When these micelles were mixed, they resulted in the rapid formation of silver nanoparticles. The synthesized nanoparticles were characterized by UV-Visible spectroscopy, transmission electron microscopy, and energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS). The nanoparticles formed had a sharp adsorption peak at 410 nm, which is characteristic of surface plasmon resonance of the silver nanoparticles. The nanoparticles were monodispersed, with an average particle size of 15.1 nm (${\sigma}={\pm}5.82$ nm), and spherical in shape. The EDS analysis revealed the presence of elemental silver signal in the synthesized nanoparticles. The formed silver nanoparticles exhibited good antibiotic activity against both Grampositive and Gram-negative pathogens and Candida albicans, suggesting their broad-spectrum antimicrobial activity.

• Journal of Korean Library and Information Science Society
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• v.46 no.1
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• pp.321-344
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• 2015

This paper presents a fusion approach to sentiment detection that combines multiple sources of evidence to retrieve blogs that contain opinions on a specific topic. Our approach to finding opinionated blogs on topic consists of first applying traditional information retrieval methods to retrieve blogs on a given topic and then boosting the ranks of opinionated blogs based on the opinion scores computed by multiple sentiment detection methods. Our sentiment detection strategy, whose central idea is to rely on a variety of complementary evidences rather than trying to optimize the utilization of a single source of evidence, includes High Frequency module, which identifies opinions based on the frequency of opinion terms (i.e., terms that occur frequently in opinionated documents), Low Frequency module, which makes use of uncommon/rare terms (e.g., "sooo good") that express strong sentiments, IU Module, which leverages n-grams with IU (I and you) anchor terms (e.g., I believe, You will love), Wilson's lexicon module, which uses a collection-independent opinion lexicon constructed from Wilson's subjectivity terms, and Opinion Acronym module, which utilizes a small set of opinion acronyms (e.g., imho). The results of our study show that combining multiple sources of opinion evidence is an effective method for improving opinion detection performance.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers Conference
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• 2004.11a
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• pp.452-455
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• 2004

In this paper, investigations of the SAMs(self-assembled monolayers) of a thiol-fuctionalized viologen derivatives, $V_8SH$ and $SH_8V_8SH$, where, V is N,N'-dialkylbipyridinium (i.e. a viologen group), have been carried out by elucidate voltammetry date. The redox reactions are highly reversible and can be cycled many times without significant side reaction, which has been known as a nano-gram order mass detector through resonant frequency change self-assembly process of the viologen has been investigated with $QCM({\Delta}F)$. The assembling process of the $V_8SH$ and $SH_8V_8SH$ monolayers can be finished completely in about 1 hour. The measured frequency shift for $V_8SH$ and $SH_8V_8SH$ were about 351 and 172 Hz, respectively. From these values, we calculated that the mass adsorbed $V_8SH$ and $SH_8V_8SH$ were about 375 and 183 ng. We believe that this mass loss is caused by the simultaneous loss of the anions present within the monolayer for charge compensation of the viologen dications and some solvent.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.11 no.5 s.43
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• pp.75-86
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• 2006

Target word selection is one of the most important and difficult tasks in English-Korean Machine Translation. It effects on the translation accuracy of machine translation systems. In this paper, we present a new approach to select Korean target word for an English noun with translation ambiguities using multiple knowledge such as verb frame patterns, sense vectors based on collocations, statistical Korean local context information and co-occurring POS information. Verb frame patterns constructed with dictionary and corpus play an important role in resolving the sparseness problem of collocation data. Sense vectors are a set of collocation data when an English word having target selection ambiguities is to be translated to specific Korean target word. Statistical Korean local context Information is an N-gram information generated using Korean corpus. The co-occurring POS information is a statistically significant POS clue which appears with ambiguous word. The experiment showed promising results for diverse sentences from web documents.

• Industrial Engineering and Management Systems
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.224-230
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• 2016

The use of new words, numerous spoken languages, and abbreviations on the Internet is extensive. As such, automatically acquiring words for the purpose of analyzing Internet content is very difficult. In a previous study, we proposed a method for Japanese word segmentation using character N-grams. The previously proposed method is based on a simple state-transition model that is established under the assumption that the input document is described based on four states (denoted as A, B, C, and D) specified beforehand: state A represents words (nouns, verbs, etc.); state B represents statement separators (punctuation marks, conjunctions, etc.); state C represents postpositions (namely, words that follow nouns); and state D represents prepositions (namely, words that precede nouns). According to this state-transition model, based on the states applied to each pseudo-word, we search the document from beginning to end for an accessible pattern. In other words, the process of this transition detects some words during the search. In the present paper, we perform experiments based on the proposed word acquisition algorithm using Japanese and Chinese newspaper articles. These articles were obtained from Japan's Kyoto University and the Chinese People's Daily. The proposed method does not depend on the language structure. If text documents are expressed in Unicode the proposed method can, using the same algorithm, obtain words in Japanese and Chinese, which do not contain spaces between words. Hence, we demonstrate that the proposed method is language independent.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartB
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• v.11B no.2
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• pp.241-246
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• 2004

In this paper, we propose VCCV units as a processing unit of language model and compare them with clauses and morphemes of existing processing units. Clauses and morphemes have many vocabulary and high perplexity. But VCCV units have low perplexity because of the small lexicon and the limited vocabulary. The construction of language models needs an issue of the smoothing. The smoothing technique used to better estimate probabilities when there is an insufficient data to estimate probabilities accurately. This paper made a language model of morphemes, clauses and VCCV units and calculated their perplexity. The perplexity of VCCV units is lower than morphemes and clauses units. We constructed the N-grams of VCCV units with low perplexity and tested the language model using Katz, absolute, modified Kneser-Ney smoothing and so on. In the experiment results, the modified Kneser-Ney smoothing is tested proper smoothing technique for VCCV units.