• Biomolecules & Therapeutics
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.256-262
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• 2005

We examined the signaling molecules involved in the 6-hydroxydopamine (6-OHDA)-induced neuronal cell death and increase in cellular glutathione (GSH) level in SK-N-SH cells. The 6-OH-DA-induced cell death was significantly prevented by the pretreatment with N-acetylcysteine (NAC), a thiol antioxidant, and BAPTA, an intracellular $Ca^{2+}$ chelator. Although 6-OHDA induced ERK phosphorylation, the pretreatment with PD98059, an ERK inhibitor, did not block 6-OHDA-induced cell death. In addition, the 6-OHDA-induced activation of caspase-3, a key signal for apoptosis, was blocked by the pretreatment with NAC and BAPTA. While the level of reactive oxygen species (ROS) was significantly increased in the 6-OHDA-treated cells, the cellular GSH level was not altered for the first 6-hr exposure to 6-OHDA, but after then, the level was significantly increased, which was also blocked by the pretreatment with NAC and BAPTA, but not by PD98059. Depletion of GSH by pretreating the cells with DL-buthionine-(S,R)-sulfoximine (BSO), a glutathione synthesis inhibitor, rather significantly potentiated the 6-OHDA-induced death. In contrast to the pretreatment with NAC, 6-OHDA-induced cell death was not prevented by the post-treatment with NAC 30 min after 6-OHDA treatment. The results indicate that the GSH level which is increased adaptively by the 6-OHDA-induced ROS and intracellular $Ca^{2+}$ is not enough to overcome the death signal mediated through ROS-$Ca^{2+}$ -caspase pathway.

• Journal of the Korean Association of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons
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• v.30 no.5
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• pp.438-443
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• 2004

Objectives : The proper development of the facial structures relies upon a sequence of tightly regulated signaling interactions between the ectoderm and mesoderm involving the participation of several families of signaling molecules. Among these, bone morphogenetic proteins (BMPs) have been suggested to be a key signal that regulates the development of the mandible and the initiation and morphogenesis of the teeth. The aim of this study was to examine the artificial development of the mandibular structures and to examine the role of BMPs on tooth morphogenesis and differentiation using an organ culture system. Materials and Methods : The tooth germs from Ed 11.5, 13.5 mice were dissected, and transplanted into the diastema of the mandible primordia. The mandibles containing the transplanted tooth germs were cultured in vitro. During this period, beads soaked with BMP4 were implanted around the transplanted tooth germs. In addition, a diastema block containing the transplanted tooth germ was dissected, then transferred to an adult mouse kidney. After the organ culture, the developing mandibular explant was removed from the kidney and prepared for the tissue specimens. Odontogeneis of the transplanted tooth germs was examined after Hematoxylin-eosin, Masson-trichrome staining. Results : Proliferation and differentiation of the tooth germs cultured in the diastema was observed. In the BMP4-treated tooth germs, the formation of the first and second molars was noted. The crown of the developing tooth showed the formation of a mature cusp with the deposition of enamel and dentin matrix. In conclusion, it was confirmed that BMP4 is involved in the formation of a dental crown and the differentiation of ameloblasts and odontoblasts of the molar tooth during the development of the transplanted tooth germs.

• Genomics & Informatics
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• v.5 no.4
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• pp.174-178
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• 2007

The earliest stages of mammalian embryogenesis are governed by the activity of maternally inherited transcripts and proteins. Cytoplasmic polyadenylation of selected maternal mRNA has been reported to be a major control mechanism of delayed translation during preimplantation embryogenesis in mice. The presence of cis-elements required for cytoplasmic polyadenylation (e.g., CPE) can serve as a useful tag in the screening of maternal genes partaking in key functions in the transcriptionally dormant egg and early embryo. However, due to its relative simplicity, UA-rich sequences satisfying the canonical rule of known CPE consensus sequences are often found in the 3'-UTR of maternal transcripts that do not actually undergo cytoplasmic polyadenylation. In this study, we developed a method to confirm the validity of candidate CPE sequences in a given gene by a multiplex comparison of 3'-UTR sequences between mammalian homologs. We found that genes undergoing cytoplasmic polyadenylation tend to create a conserved block around the CPE, while CPE-like sequences in the 3'-UTR of genes lacking cytoplasmic polyadenylation do not exhibit such conservation between species. Through this cross-species comparison, we also identified an alternative CPE in the 3'-UTR of tissue-type plasminogen activator (tPA), which is more likely to serve as a functional element. We suggest that verification of CPEs based on sequence conservation can provide a convenient tool for mass screening of factors governing the earliest processes of mammalian embryogenesis.

• Tunnel and Underground Space
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• v.15 no.1 s.54
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• pp.47-54
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• 2005

One of the standard procedures of discontinuity survey is the joint set identification from the population of field orientation data. Discontinuity set identification is fundamental to rock engineering tasks such as rock mass classification, discrete element analysis, key block analysis. and discrete fracture network modeling. Conventionally, manual method using contour plot had been widely used for this task, but this method has some short-comings such as yielding subjective identification results, manual operations, and so on. In this study, the method of discontinuity set identification using genetic algorithm was introduced, but slightly modified to handle the orientation data. Finally, based on the genetic algorithm, we developed a FORTRAN program, Genetic Algorithm based Clustering(GAC) and applied it to two different discontinuity data sets. Genetic Algorithm based Clustering(GAC) was proved to be a fast and efficient method for the discontinuity set identification task. In addition, fitness function based on variance showed more efficient performance in finding the optimal number of clusters when compared with Davis - Bouldin index.

• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.37 no.1
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• pp.8-18
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• 2010

Traditional storage server suffers from duplicated data blocks which cause an waste of storage space and network bandwidth. To address this problem, various de-duplication mechanisms are proposed. Especially, lots of works are limited to backup server that exploits Contents-Defined Chunking (CDC). In backup server, duplicated blocks can be easily traced by using Anchor, therefore CDC scheme is widely used for backup server. In this paper, we propose a new de-duplication mechanism for improving a storage system. We focus on efficient algorithm for supporting general purpose de-duplication server including backup server, P2P server, and FTP server. The key idea is to adapt stride scheme on traditional fixed block duplication checking mechanism. Experimental result shows that the proposed mechanism can minimize computation time for detecting duplicated region of blocks and efficiently manage storage systems.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.4 no.4
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• pp.71-78
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• 2004

Dedicated Short Range Communications(DSRC) as a prominent communications candidate for Intelligent Transportation Systems(ITS) have been developed to support ITS applications such as value-added information service, e-commerce, electronic toll payment, etc. These various applications associated with electronic payment through unsecure communication channel of DSRC suffer from security threats. To ensure secure payment, we have adopted appropriate cryptographic mechanisms including encipherment, authentication exchange and digital signature. The cryptographic mechanisms require to use cryptographic keys established between two communication entities. In this paper, we propose a secure electronic payment system which is designed to have some functions for strong authentication, encryption, key agreement, etc. Especially, we adopt domestic developed cryptographic algorithms such as EC-KCDSA and SEED for digital signature and block cipher, respectively. We can show those mechanisms are appropriate for the secure electronic payment system for ITS services under the DSRC wireless environment in aspects of constrained computational resource use and processing speed.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.17 no.11
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• pp.196-201
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• 2016

Digital watermarking is a technique used to hide information within digital media. Digital watermarking techniques can be classified as either robust watermarking or fragile watermarking. Robust watermarking techniques are generally used for the purpose of copyright protection. In addition, fragile watermarking techniques are used for the authentication and integrity verification of a digital image. Therefore, fragile watermarks should be easily breakable for trivial tampering of a watermarked image. This paper proposes an efficient fragile watermarking method for image tamper detection in the spatial domain. In the proposed method, a hash code and symmetric key encryption algorithm are used. The proposed method of inserting a watermark by dividing the original image into many blocks of small sizes is not weak against attacks, such as cut and paste. The proposed method can detect the manipulated parts of a watermarked image without testing the entire block of the image.

• JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.111-124
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• 2002

The ferroelectric RAM (FeRAM) has a great advantage for a system on a chip (SOC) and mobile product memory, since FeRAM not only supports non-volatility but also delivers a fast memory access similar to that of DRAM and SRAM. This work develops at three levels: 1) low voltage operation with boost voltage control of bitline and plateline, 2) reducing bitline capacitance with multiple divided sub cell array, and 3) increasing chip performance with write operation sharing both active and precharge time period. The key techniques are implemented on the proposed hierarchy bitline scheme with proposed hybrid-bitline and high voltage boost control. The test chip and simulation results show the performance of sub-1.5 voltage operation with single step pumping voltage and self-boost control in a cell array block of 1024 ($64{\;}{\times}{\;}16$) rows and 64 columns.

• Journal of IKEEE
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.1321-1327
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• 2019

This paper describes an efficient hardware implementation of modular square root (MSQR) computation over GF(p), which is the operation needed to map plaintext messages to points on elliptic curves for elliptic curve (EC)-ElGamal public-key encryption. Our method supports five sizes of elliptic curves over GF(p) defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) standard. For the Koblitz curves and the pseudorandom curves with 192-bit, 256-bit, 384-bit and 521-bit, the Euler's Criterion based on the characteristic of the modulo values was applied. For the elliptic curves with 224-bit, the Tonelli-Shanks algorithm was simplified and applied to compute MSQR. The proposed method was implemented using the finite field arithmetic circuit with 32-bit datapath and memory block of elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) processor, and its hardware operation was verified by implementing it on the Virtex-5 field programmable gate array (FPGA) device. When the implemented circuit operates with a 50 MHz clock, the computation of MSQR takes about 18 ms for 224-bit pseudorandom curves and about 4 ms for 256-bit Koblitz curves.

• Biomolecules & Therapeutics
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.295-300
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• 2014

The actin cytoskeleton plays an important role in macrophage-mediated inflammatory responses by modulating the activation of Src and subsequently inducing nuclear factor (NF)-${\kappa}B$ translocation. In spite of its critical functions, few papers have examined how the actin cytoskeleton can be regulated by the activation of toll-like receptor (TLR). Therefore, in this study, we further characterized the biological value of the actin cytoskeleton in the functional activation of macrophages using an actin cytoskeleton disruptor, cytochalasin B (Cyto B), and explored the actin cytoskeleton's involvement in morphological changes, cellular attachment, and signaling events. Cyto B strongly suppressed the TLR4-mediated mRNA expression of inflammatory genes such as cyclooxygenase (COX)-2, tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-${\alpha}$, and inducible nitric oxide (iNOS), without altering cell viability. This compound also strongly suppressed the morphological changes induced by lipopolysaccharide (LPS), a TLR4 ligand. Cyto B also remarkably suppressed NO production under non-adherent conditions but not in an adherent environment. Cyto B did not block the co-localization between surface glycoprotein myeloid differentiation protein-2 (MD2), a LPS signaling glycoprotein, and the actin cytoskeleton under LPS conditions. Interestingly, Cyto B and PP2, a Src inhibitor, enhanced the phagocytic uptake of fluorescein isothiocyanate (FITC)-dextran. Finally, it was found that Cyto B blocked the phosphorylation of vasodilator-stimulated phosphoprotein (VASP) at 1 min and the phosphorylation of heat shock protein 27 (HSP27) at 5 min. Therefore, our data suggest that the actin cytoskeleton may be one of the key components involved in the control of TLR4-mediated inflammatory responses in macrophages.