• Journal of Microbiology and Biotechnology
• /
• v.21 no.1
• /
• pp.93-99
• /
• 2011

Amongst a number of potential nonviral vectors, cationic liposomes have been actively researched, with both gemini surfactants and bola amphiphiles reported as being in possession of good structures in terms of cell viability and in vitro transfection. In this study, a cholesterol-based diquaternary ammonium gemini surfactant (Chol-GS) was synthesized and assessed as a novel nonviral gene vector. Chol-GS was synthesized from cholesterol by way of four reaction steps. The optimal efficiency was found to be at a weight ratio of 1:4 of lipid:DOPE (1,2-dioleoyl-L-${\alpha}$- glycero-3-phosphatidylethanolamine), and at a ratio of between 10:1~15:1 of liposome:DNA. The transfection efficiency was compared with commercial liposomes and with Lipofectamine, 1,2-dimyristyloxypropyl-3-dimethylhydroxyethylammonium bromide (DMRIE-C), and N-[1-(2,3-dioleoyloxy)propyl]-N,N,N-trimethylammonium chloride (DOTAP). The results indicate that the efficiency of Chol-GS is greater than that of all the tested commercial liposomes in COS7 and Huh7 cells, and higher than DOTAP and Lipofectamine in A549 cells. Confirmation of these findings was observed through the use of green fluorescent protein expression. Chol-GS exhibited a moderate level of cytotoxicity, at optimum concentrations for efficient transfection, indicating cell viability. Hence, the newly synthesized Chol-GS liposome has the potential of being an excellent nonviral vector for gene delivery.

• Archives of Pharmacal Research
• /
• v.26 no.11
• /
• pp.892-897
• /
• 2003

Anticancer drugs have serious side effects arising from their poor malignant cells selectivity, Since insulin receptors highly express on the cytomembrane of some kind of tumor cells, using insulin as the vector was expected to reduce serious side effects of the drugs. The objective of this study was to evaluate the tumor targeting effect of the newly synthesized mitoxantrone-insulin conjugate (MIT-INS) with the drug loading of 11.68%. In vitro stability trials showed MIT-INS were stable in buffers with different pH (2-8) at $37^{\circ}C$ within 120 h (less than 3% of free MIT released), and were also stable in mouse plasma within 48 h (less than 1 % of free MIT released). In vivo study on tumor-bearing mice showed that, compared with MIT [75.92 $\mu g \cdot$ h/g of the area under the concentration-time curve (AUC) and 86.85 h of mean residence time (MRT)], the conjugates had better tumor-targeting efficiency with enhanced tumor AUC of 126.53 1l9 h/g and MTR of 151.95 h. The conjugate had much lower toxicity to most other tissues with targeting indexes ($TI^c$) no larger than 0.3 besides good tumor targeting efficiency with $TI^c$ of 1.67. The results suggest the feasibility to promote the curative effect in ca.ncer chemotherapy by using insulin as the vector of anti-cancer drugs.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
• /
• v.20 no.5
• /
• pp.35-47
• /
• 2001

This paper describes an efficient harmonic-CELP speech coder by taking advantages of harmonic and CELP coders into account. According to frame voicing decision, the proposed harmonic-CELP coder adopts the RP-VSELP coder as a fast CELP in case of an unvoiced frame, or an improved harmonic coder in case of a voiced frame. The proposed coder has main features as follows: simple pitch detection, fast harmonic estimation, variable dimension harmonic vector quantization, perceptual weighting reflecting frequency resolution, fast harmonic synthesis, naturalness control using band voicing, and multi-mode. These features make the proposed coder require very low complexity, compared with HVXC coder To demonstrate the performance of the proposed coder, a 2.4 kbps coder has been implemented and compared with reference coders. From results of informal listening tests, the proposed coder showed good quality while requiring low delay and complexity.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Applied Microbiology Conference
• /
• 2001.06a
• /
• pp.155-157
• /
• 2001

Bifidobacterium spp. is nonpathogenic, gram-positive and anaerobic bacteria, which inhabit the intestinal tract of humans and animals. In breast-fed infants, bifidobacteria comprise morethan 90％ of the gut bacterial population. Bifidobacteria spp. are used in commericial fermented dairy products and have been suggested to exert health promoting effects on the host by maintaining intestinal microflora balances, improving lactose tolerance, reducing serum cholesterol levels, increasing synthesis of vitamins, and aiding the immune enchancement and anticarcinogenic activity for the host. These beneficial effects of Bifidobacterium are strain-related. Therefore continued efforts to improve strain characteristics are warranted. in these respect, development of vector system for Bifidobacterium is very important not only for the strain improvement but also because Bifidobacterium is most promising in serving as a delivery system for the useful gene products, such as vaccine or anticarcinogenic polypeptides, into human intestinal tract. For developing vector system, we have characterized several bifidobacterial plasmids at genetic level and developed several shuttle vectors between E. coli and Bifidobacterium using them. Also, we have cloned and sequenced several metabolic genes and food grade selection marker. Also we have obtained bifidobacterial surface protein, which will be used as the mediator for surface display of foreign genes. Recently we have succeeded in expressing amylase and GFP in Bifidobacterium using our own expression vector system. Now we are in a very exciting stage for the molecular breeding and safe delivery system using probiotic Bifidobacterium strains.

• Journal of Plant Biotechnology
• /
• v.31 no.4
• /
• pp.285-293
• /
• 2004

FMDV is a viral pathogen that caused foot-and-mouth disease in animals. VP1 is a major capsid protein of FMDV. It is known as one of best materials for the FMDV diagnosis and for the development of protein vaccine. In this study, 633 bp of VP1 gene was modified for the expression of VP1 in plant, based on the VP1 DNA sequence from FMDV taiwan O type and from FMDV isolated vietnam. The. deduced DNA fragment was artificially synthesized using the multiple fragment extension with long-nucleotides. A new plant transgenic vector system, pCAMBIA139011 was constructed on the basis of pBI12l and pCAMBIA1390. Using this vector system and GFP gene or modified VP1 gene, each target gene was introduced into Nicotiana tabacum. The insertion of whole target gene was successfully confirmed in each transgenic plant named GFP-A7 and VP1-4, respectively. The expression level of each gene was estimated by RT-PCR and Real-Time PCR using VP1, GFP specific primers.

• Journal of Microbiology and Biotechnology
• /
• v.20 no.2
• /
• pp.356-362
• /
• 2010

Ceramide is important not only for the maintenance of the barrier function of the skin but also for the water-binding capacity of the stratum corneum. Although the exact role of ceramide in the human skin is not fully understood, ceramide has become a widely used ingredient in cosmetic and pharmaceutical industries. Compared with other microorganisms, yeast is more suitable for the production of ceramide because yeast grows fast and is non-toxic. However, production of ceramide from yeast has not been widely studied and most work in this area has been carried out using Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Regulating the genes that are involved in sphingolipid synthesis is necessary to increase ceramide production. In this study, we investigated the effect of the genes involved in the synthesis of ceramide, lcb1, lcb2, tsc10, lac1, lag1, and sur2, on ceramide production levels. The genes were cloned into pYES2 high copy number vectors. S. cerevisiae was cultivated on YPDG medium at $30^{\circ}C$. Ceramide was purified from the cell extracts by solvent extraction and the ceramide content was analyzed by HPLC using ELSD. The maximum production of ceramide (9.8 mg ceramide/g cell) was obtained when the tsc10 gene was amplified by the pYES2 vector. Real-time RT-PCR analysis showed that the increase in ceramide content was proportional to the increase in the tsc10 gene expression level, which was 4.56 times higher than that of the control strain.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
• /
• v.38C no.2
• /
• pp.213-218
• /
• 2013

One of the most popular approaches to parameter adaptation in hidden Markov model (HMM) based systems is the maximum likelihood linear regression (MLLR) technique. In our previous study, we proposed factored MLLR (FMLLR) where each MLLR parameter is defined as a function of a control vector. We presented a method to train the FMLLR parameters based on a general framework of the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm. Using the proposed algorithm, supplementary information which cannot be included in the models is effectively reflected in the adaptation process. In this paper, we apply the FMLLR algorithm to a pitch sequence as well as spectrum parameters. In a series of experiments on artificial generation of expressive speech, we evaluate the performance of the FMLLR technique and also compare with other approaches to parameter adaptation in HMM-based speech synthesis.

• Journal of the korean academy of Pediatric Dentistry
• /
• v.28 no.2
• /
• pp.238-246
• /
• 2001

Bone morphogenetic proteins(BMPs), members of the transforming growth factor $\beta$(TGF-$\beta$) superfamily were first identified as the factors that induce ectopic bone formation in vivo, when implanted into muscular tissue. Especially BMP-2 inhibits terminal differentiation of C2C12 myoblasts and converts them into osteoblast lineage cells. In the molecular mechanism of the signal transduction of TGF-$\beta$ and related factors, intracellular signaling proteins were identified as Smad. In previous study, it has been reported that Smad 1 and Smad 5, which belong to the R-Smad family mediate BMP signaling, were involved in the induction of osteoblast differentiation in C2C12 cells. To understnad the role of Smads involved in osteogenic transdifferentiation in C2C12 cell, in present study, after we stably transfected C2C12 cells with each. Smad(Smad 1,Smad 5) expression vector, cultured for 3 days and stained for alkaline phophatase activity. ALP activity positive cells appeared in the Smad 1, Smad 5 stably transfected cell even in the abscence of BMP. After transiently co-transfected C2C12 cells with each Smad expression vector and ALP promoter, it was examined that Smad 1 and Smad 5 expression vector had increased about 2 fold ALP promoter activity in the abscence of BMP. These result suggested that both Smad 1 and Smad 5 were involved in the intracellular BMP signals which induce osteoblast differentiation in C2C12 cells. The effect of BMP on C2C12 cells with Smad 1, Smad 5 transfected were studied by using northern blot analysis. the treatment of BMP upregulated ALP mRNA level in three groups, especially upregulation of ALP was larger in Smad 1, Smad 5 transfected cell than control group. Pretreatment with cycloheximide($10{\mu}g/ml$), a protein synthesis inhibitor resulted in blocking the ALP gene expression even in BMP(100ng/ml) treated cell. These results suggested that Smad increased the level of ALP mRNA via the synthesis of a certain transcriptional regulatory protein.

• Tuberculosis and Respiratory Diseases
• /
• v.44 no.3
• /
• pp.547-558
• /
• 1997

Background : Tumor necrosis factor(TNF) has been considered as an important candidate for cancer gene therapy based on its potent anti-tumor activity. However, since the efficiency of current techniques of gene transfer is not satisfactory, the majorities of current protocols is aiming the in vitro gene transfer to cancer cells and re-introducing genetically modified cancer cells to hoot. In previous study, it was shown that TNF-sensitive cancer cells transfected with TNF-$\alpha$ cDNA would become highly resistant to TNF. Understanding the mechanisms of TNF-resistance in TNF-$\alpha$ gene transfected cancer cells would be an important step for improving the efficacy of cancer gene therapy as well as for better understandings of tumor biology. This study was designed to evaluate the role of new protective protein synthesis in the acquired resistance to TNF of TNF-$\alpha$ gene transfected cancer cells. Method : We transfected TNF-$\alpha$ c-DNA to WEHI164, a murine fibrosarcoma cell line, using retroviral vector(pLT12SN(TNF)) and confirm the expression of TNF with PCR, ELISA, MIT assay. Then we determined the TNF resistance of TNF gene transfected cells(WEHI164-TNF) and the changes of TNF sensitivities after treatments with actinomycin D(transcription inhibitor) and cycloheximide ( translation inhibitor). Results : WEHI164 which was sensitive to TNF became resistant to TNF after being transfected with TNF-$\alpha$ gene and the resistance to TNF was partially reversed after treatment with actinomycin D, but not with cycloheximide. Conclusion : The acquired resistance to TNF after TNF-$\alpha$ gene transfection may be associated with synthesis of some protective proteins.

• The Transactions of the Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers B
• /
• v.53 no.3
• /
• pp.173-179
• /
• 2004

A synthesis method of the reduced-order extended Luenberger observer (ROELO) and its design procedure for a nonlinear dynamic system are presented. This paper proposes a method to reduce the order of the observer and to ! elect the observer gain matrix. The proposed algorithm is applied for high performance induction motor drives without a speed sensor The simulation and experiment results show that the proposed ROELO provides both rotor flux and rotor speed estimation with good performance.