• Journal of Plant Biotechnology
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• v.44 no.2
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• pp.107-114
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• 2017

Implementation of crop improvement programs relies on genetic diversity. To overcome the limited occurrence of natural mutations, researchers and breeders applied diverse methods, ranging from conventional crossing to classical bio-technologies. Earlier generations of knockout and gain-of-function technologies often result in incomplete gene disruption or random insertions of transgenes into plant genomes. The newly developed editing tool, CRISPR/Cas9 system, not only provides a powerful platform to efficiently modify target traits, but also broadens the scope and prospects of genome editing. Customized Cas9/guide RNA (gRNA) systems suitable for efficient genomic modification of mammalian cells or plants have been reported. Following successful demonstration of this technology in mammalian cells, CRISPR/Cas9 was successfully adapted in plants, and accumulating evidence of its feasibility has been reported in model plants and major crops. Recently, a modified version of CRISPR/Cas9 with added novel functions has been developed that enables programmable direct irreversible conversion of a target DNA base. In this review, we summarized the milestone applications of CRISPR/Cas9 in plants with a focus on major crops. We also present the implications of an improved version of this technology in the current plant breeding programs.

• Journal of Microbiology and Biotechnology
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• v.28 no.12
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• pp.1955-1970
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• 2018

Several genetic strategies have been proposed for the successful transformation and expression of microbial transgenes in model and crop plants. Here, we bring into focus the prominent applications of microbial transgenes in plants for the development of disease resistance; mitigation of stress conditions; augmentation of food quality; and use of plants as "bioreactors" for the production of recombinant proteins, industrially important enzymes, vaccines, antimicrobial compounds, and other valuable secondary metabolites. We discuss the applicable and cost-effective approaches of transgenesis in different plants, as well as the limitations thereof. We subsequently present the contemporary developments in targeted genome editing systems that have facilitated the process of genetic modification and manifested stable and consumer-friendly, genetically modified plants and their products. Finally, this article presents the different approaches and demonstrates the introduction and expression of microbial transgenes for the improvement of plant resistance to pathogens and abiotic stress conditions and the production of valuable compounds, together with the promising research progress in targeted genome editing technology. We include a special discussion on the highly efficient CRISPR-Cas system helpful in microbial transgene editing in plants.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Crop Science Conference
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• 2017.06a
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• pp.181-181
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• 2017

Global warming and climate change have been one of the most important problems last 2 decades. Global warming is known to cause abnormal climate and influence ecology, food production and human health. According to climate change model global warming is causing expansion of drought and increase of evaporation. Therefore, securing water in agriculture has been an important issue for crop cultivation. As potato is susceptible to drought, water shortage generally results in decrease of yield and decrease of biomass. In this research, we investigated characteristics of inorganic nutrient absorption and growth of plants grown under drought condition. Plants were sampled in sites of Cheong-ju and Gangneung, where the severity of drought stress were different. During the growth period in Gangneung, total rainfall in 2016 decreased by 50% compared with those in last 5 years average. Especially, there was almost no rain in tuber enlargement period (from mid-May to mid-June). On the other hand, the total rainfall in of Cheong-ju was is similar to those in last 5 years average. Inorganic components including K, Ca and Mg and plant growth factors such as plant length, stem length, leaf area index and plant biomass were investigated. Tuber yields in both areas were investigated at harvest. Growth period of plants was is longer in Cheong-ju than that in Gangneung. Contents of all inorganic components were higher in plants grown in Cheong-ju than in Gangneung. The results were attributed to higher production of plant biomass in Cheong-ju. Considering the results, severe drought stress conditions in Gangneung accelerated plant aging and resulted in low plant growth. Although total yield was greatly reduced under drought stress the rate of commercial yield was is not significantly different with non-drought conditions.

• Korean Journal of Agricultural Science
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• v.47 no.2
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• pp.305-313
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• 2020

Root hair development has the potential to increase crop yields and at the same time to decrease fertilizer use, which will be required in the next 30 years to meet the demand for crop-derived commodities in a world with decreasing available natural resources. Root hair defective six (RHD6) encoding a basic helix-loop-helix transcription factor, is associated with root hair differentiation, and its roles are root hair initiation and elongation. Grass plants, rice and Brachypodium have been used as model plants to study the gene function of the root hair defective six like (RSL) subfamily which is orthologous to AtRHD6. The RSL subfamily has an identical gene function with AtRHD6 which is involved with root hair differentiation as well. Plants with longer root hairs within a species should have an improved Pi uptake efficiency; therefore, we would expect that a plant with a high Pi uptake could contribute to increasing the plant yield. We achieved increased root hair length by manipulating the RSL subfamily genes. It is expected that in these transgenic plants, the long root hairs would be sufficient to improve the Pi uptake and hence improve biomass and yield component (tiller, spikelet number, and spikelet weight) of the plant. Here, we demonstrate that Brachypodium transgenic plants overexpressing the BdRSL subfamily genes have an improved biomass and grain yield. The result of this study could be applied to important crop plants like rice.

• Journal of Plant Biotechnology
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• v.39 no.1
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• pp.13-22
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• 2012

Plant regeneration has been optimized increasingly by organogenesis and somatic embryogenesis using a range of explants with tissue culture improvements focusing on factors, such as the age of the explant, genotype, media supplements and $Agrobacterium$ co-cultivation. The production of haploids and doubled haploids using microspores has accelerated the production of homozygous lines in Brassicaceae crop plants. Somatic cell fusion has facilitated the development of interspecific and intergeneric hybrids in sexually incompatible species of $Brassica$. Crop improvement using somaclonal variation has also been achieved. Transformation technologies are being exploited routinely to elucidate the gene function and contribute to the development of novel enhanced crops. The $Agrobacterium$-mediated transformation is the most widely used approach for the introduction of transgenes into Brassicaceae, and $in$ $vitro$ regeneration is a key factor in developing an efficient transformation method in plants. Although many other Brassicaceae are used as model species for improving plant regeneration and transformation systems, this paper focuses on the recent technologies used to regenerate the most important Brassicaceae crop plants.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Crop Science Conference
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• 2019.09a
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• pp.19-19
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• 2019

It is necessary to maintain stable crop productions under the unsuitable environments, because the drought and flood may be frequently caused by the global warming. Therefore, it is agent to improve the crop growth model corresponded to soil moisture status. Chili pepper (Capsicum annuum) is one of the useful crop in Asia, and then it is affected by change of precipitation in consequence drought and flood occur however crop model to evaluate water stresses on chili pepper is not enough yet. In this study, development of crop model under different soil moisture status was attempted. The experiment was conducted on the slope fields in the greenhouse. The water level was kept at 20cm above the bottom of the container. Habanero (C. chinense) was used as material for crop model. Sap bleeding rate, SPAD value, chlorophyll content, stomatal conductance, leaf water potential, plant height, leaf area and shoot dry weight were measured at 10 days after treatment (DAT) and 13 DAT. Moreover, temperature and RH in the greenhouse, soil volume water contents (VWC) and soil water potential were measured. As a result, VWC showed 4.0% at the driest plot and 31.4% at the wettest plot at 13 DAT. The growth model was calculated using WVC and the growth analysis parameters. It was considered available, because its coefficient of determination showed 0.84 and there are significant relationship based on plants physiology among the parameters and the changes over time. Furthermore, we analyzed the important factors for higher accuracy prediction using multiple regression analysis.

• Korean Journal of Medicinal Crop Science
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• v.27 no.2
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• pp.75-85
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• 2019

Background: Medicinal plants are widely used in Asia. They have proven to be an invaluable asset in modern drug discovery and their demand has been steadily increasing across various industries. Methods and Results: Using 4,867 valid patents related to 12 oriental medicinal plants of 10 country groups, the growth and development potential of patents was evaluated. The cites per patent (CPP) and patent family size (PFS) indices were used to evaluate the market capability and technological level of the collected patents. Meanwhile, the patent impact index (PII) and technology strength (TS) were used to compare the technological competitiveness of patents among various technology types and markets. Both CPP and PFS indices showed that magnolia-vine and balloon flower have numerous core or original patents. Furthermore, an increase in both PII and TS indices was observed. A newly designed intellectual property multi-layer (IPM) model predicted that the medicine, genome and cosmetic categories have a high possibility of patent application growth. Conclusions: The IPM model can be used to provide the scope of particular technology fields for patent development. In addition, this study can assist patents to advance in the international market and guide the development of a national industrial strategy.

• Korean Journal of Weed Science
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• v.30 no.4
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• pp.390-395
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• 2010

This study was conducted to predict reduction of soybean yield as affected by different densities of Cuscuta pentagona. All data were fitted to Cousens' rectangular hyperbola model to estimate parameters for predicting soybean yield loss. The yield of soybean in the various densities (1 to 48 plants $m^{-2}$) of C. pentagona reduced by 80.3 to 99.7%, respectively. Among yield components, number of pods was the most significantly influenced by weed interferences. The prediction model for soybean yield as affected by weed competition was as follows: Y= 274.6783/(1+4.3522X), $r^2$=0.999 in C. pentagona. Economic threshold levels calculated using cousens' equation was 0.004 plants $m^{-2}$ in C. pentagona.

• KOREAN JOURNAL OF CROP SCIENCE
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• v.49 no.5
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• pp.434-439
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• 2004

Medicago truncatula is a model plant for molecular genetic studies of legumes and plant-microbe interactions. To accelerate finding of genes that play roles in the early stages of nodulation and stress responses, a trans-genic plant was developed that contains a promoter­reporter fusion. The promoter of rip], a Rhizobium-induced peroxidase gene, was fused to the coding region of $\beta-glucuronidase (GUS)$ gene and inserted into a modified plant transformation vector, pSLJ525YN, in which the bar gene was preserved from the original plasmid but the neomycin phosphotransferase gene was replaced by a polylinker. Transformation of M. truncatula was carried out by vacuum infiltration of young seedlings with Agrobacterium. Despite low survival rates of infiltrated seedlings, three independent transformants were obtained from repeated experiments. Southern blot analyses revealed that 7 of 8 transgenic plants of the T 1 generation contained the bar gene whereas 6 $T_1$ plants contained the GUS gene. These results indicate that vacuum infiltration is an effective method for transformation of M. truncatula. The progeny seeds of the transgenic plants will be useful for mutagenesis and identification of genes that are placed upstream and may influence the expression of rip] in cellular signaling processes including nodulation.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Crop Science Conference
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• 2022.10a
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• pp.88-88
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• 2022

Detection of stress responses in crops is important to diagnose crop growth and evaluate yield. Also, the multi-spectral sensor is effectively known to evaluate stress caused by nutrient and moisture in crops or biological agents such as weeds or diseases. Therefore, in this experiment, multispectral images were taken by an unmanned aerial vehicle(UAV) under field condition. The experiment was conducted in the long-term fertilizer field in the National Institute of Crop Science, and experiment area was divided into different status of NPK(Control, N-deficiency, P-deficiency, K-deficiency, Non-fertilizer). Total 11 vegetation indices were created with RGB and NIR reflectance values using python. Variations in nutrient content in plants affect the amount of light reflected or absorbed for each wavelength band. Therefore, the objective of this experiment was to evaluate vegetation indices derived from multispectral reflectance data as input into machine learning algorithm for the classification of nutritional deficiency in rice. RandomForest model was used as a representative ensemble model, and parameters were adjusted through hyperparameter tuning such as RandomSearchCV. As a result, training accuracy was 0.95 and test accuracy was 0.80, and IPCA, NDRE, and EVI were included in the top three indices for feature importance. Also, precision, recall, and f1-score, which are indicators for evaluating the performance of the classification model, showed a distribution of 0.7-0.9 for each class.