• Journal of Microbiology and Biotechnology
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• v.31 no.12
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• pp.1601-1614
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• 2021

To overcome the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, vaccination campaigns are the highest priority of majority of countries. Limited supply and worldwide disproportionate availability issues for the approved vaccines, together with concerns about rare side-effects have recently initiated the switch to heterologous vaccination, commonly known as mixing of vaccines. The COVID-19 vaccines are highly effective in the general population. However, none of the vaccines is 100% efficacious or effective, with variants posing more challenges, resulting in breakthrough cases. This review summarizes the current knowledge of immune responses to variants of concern (VOC) and breakthrough infections. Furthermore, we discuss the scope of heterologous vaccination and future strategies to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic, including fractionation of vaccine doses and alternative route of vaccination.

• IMMUNE NETWORK
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• v.21 no.5
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• pp.32.1-32.14
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• 2021

Over two hundred twenty-eight million cases of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in the world have been reported until the 21^st of September 2021 after the first rise in December 2019. The virus caused the disease called severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Over 4 million deaths blame COVID-19 during the last one year and 8 months in the world. Currently, four SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern are mainly focused by pandemic studies with limited experiments to translate the infectivity and pathogenicity of each variant. The SARS-CoV-2 α, β, γ, and δ variant of concern was originated from United Kingdom, South Africa, Brazil/Japan, and India, respectively. The classification of SARS-CoV-2 variant is based on the mutation in spike (S) gene on the envelop of SARS-CoV-2. This review describes four SARS-CoV-2 α, β, γ, and δ variants of concern including SARS-CoV-2 ε, ζ, η, ι, κ, and B.1.617.3 variants of interest and alert. Recently, SARS-CoV-2 δ variant prevails over different countries that have 3 unique mutation sites: E156del/R158G in the N-terminal domain and T478K in a crucial receptor binding domain. A particular mutation in the functional domain of the S gene is probably associated with the infectivity and pathogenesis of the SARS-CoV-2 variant.

• IMMUNE NETWORK
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.13.1-13.24
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• 2023

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is one of the most consequential global health crises in over a century. Since its discovery in 2019, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) continues to mutate into different variants and sublineages, rendering previously potent treatments and vaccines ineffective. With significant strides in clinical and pharmaceutical research, different therapeutic strategies continue to be developed. The currently available treatments can be broadly classified based on their potential targets and molecular mechanisms. Antiviral agents function by disrupting different stages of SARS-CoV-2 infection, while immune-based treatments mainly act on the human inflammatory response responsible for disease severity. In this review, we discuss some of the current treatments for COVID-19, their mode of actions, and their efficacy against variants of concern. This review highlights the need to constantly evaluate COVID-19 treatment strategies to protect high risk populations and fill in the gaps left by vaccination.

• Interdisciplinary Bio Central
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• v.3 no.2
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• pp.6.1-6.3
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• 2011

Diabetes Mellitus (DM), often simply referred to as diabetes, has developed into a major health concern affecting more than 200 million people worldwide with approximately 4 million deaths per year attributed to the presence of the disease. Diabetes mellitus is categorized as Type 1 and Type 2, where Type 1 diabetes represents a lack of insulin production, and Type 2 diabetes is characterized by a relative lack of insulin receptor (i.e., decreased sensitivity to the effect of insulin) and cased by a complex interplay between genetic factors and environmental factors. Up to date, various studies on the pathology and mechanism in terms of genetic experiments have been conducted and approximately hundreds of genes were reported as diabetes mellitus associated genes. At this point, to support studies on the cause and mechanism of diabetes mellitus, an efficient database system to provide genetic variants related to diabetes mellitus is needed. DMBase is an integrated web-based genetic information resource for diabetes mellitus designed to service genomic variants, genes, and secondary information derived for diabetes mellitus genetics researchers. The current version of DMBase documents 754 genes with 3056 genetic variants and 66 pathways. It provides many effective search interfaces for retrieving diabetes mellitus and genetic information. A web interface for the DMBase is freely available at http://sysbio.kribb.re.kr/dmBase.

• IMMUNE NETWORK
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• v.22 no.6
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• pp.48.1-48.13
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• 2022

With the spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) variants, which are randomly mutated, the dominant strains in regions are changing globally. The development of preclinical animal models is imperative to validate vaccines and therapeutics against SARS-CoV-2 variants. The objective of this study was to develop a non-human primate (NHP) model for SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant infection. Cynomolgus macaques infected with Delta variants showed infectious viruses and viral RNA in the upper (nasal and throat) and lower respiratory (lung) tracts during the acute phase of infection. After 3 days of infection, lesions consistent with diffuse alveolar damage were observed in the lungs. For cellular immune responses, all macaques displayed transient lymphopenia and neutrophilia in the early stages of infection. SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant spike protein-specific IgM, IgG, and IgA levels were significantly increased in the plasma of these animals 14 days after infection. This new NHP Delta variant infection model can be used for comparative analysis of the difference in severity between SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern and may be useful in the efficacy evaluation of vaccines and universal therapeutic drugs for mutations.

• IEMEK Journal of Embedded Systems and Applications
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.241-255
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• 2015

Recent network environment has been rapidly evolved to cloud computing environment based on the development of the Internet technologies. Furthermore there is an increasing demand on mobile cloud computing due to explosive growth of smart devices and wide deployment of LTE-based cellular networks. Thus mobile Desktop-as-a-Service(DaaS) could be a pervasive service for nomadic users. In addition, video streaming traffic is currently more than two-thirds of mobile traffic and ever increasing. All such trends enable that video streaming in mobile DaaS could be an important concern for mobile cloud computing. It should be noted that the performance of the Transmission Control Protocol(TCP) on cloud host servers greatly affects Quality of Service(QoS) of video streams for mobile users. With widely deployed Linux server platforms for cloud computing, in this paper, we conduct an experimental analysis of the twelve Linux TCP variants in mobile DaaS environments. The results of our experiments show that the TCP Illinois outperforms the other TCP variants in terms of wide range of packet loss rate and propagation delay over LTE-based wireless links between cloud servers and mobile devices, even though TCP CUBIC is usually used in default in the current Linux systems.

• IMMUNE NETWORK
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.33.1-33.13
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• 2023

Vaccination against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has been acknowledged as an effective mean of preventing infection and hospitalization. However, the emergence of highly transmissible SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern (VOCs) has led to substantial increase in infections among children and adolescents. Vaccine-induced immunity and longevity have not been well defined in this population. Therefore, we aimed to analyze humoral and cellular immune responses against ancestral and SARS-CoV-2 variants after two shots of the BNT162b2 vaccine in healthy adolescents. Although vaccination induced a robust increase of spike-specific binding Abs and neutralizing Abs against the ancestral and SARS-CoV-2 variants, the neutralizing activity against the Omicron variant was significantly low. On the contrary, vaccine-induced memory CD4⁺ T cells exhibited substantial responses against both ancestral and Omicron spike proteins. Notably, CD4⁺ T cell responses against both ancestral and Omicron strains were preserved at 3 months after two shots of the BNT162b2 vaccine without waning. Polyfunctionality of vaccine-induced memory T cells was also preserved in response to Omicron spike protein. The present findings characterize the protective immunity of vaccination for adolescents in the era of continuous emergence of variants/subvariants.

• The Journal of the Institute of Internet, Broadcasting and Communication
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.129-137
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• 2016

Transmission Control Protocol as a transport layer protocol provides steady data transfer service. There are some serious concerns about the performance of TCP over diverse networks. The vital concern in TCP network environment is congestion which may occur due to quick transmission rates or because of large number of new connections entering the network at the same time. Size of queues in routers grows thus resulting in packet drops. Retransmission of the dropped packets, and reduced throughput can prove costly. Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) in conjunction with Active Queue Management mechanisms (AQM) such as Random early detection (RED) is used for packet marking rather than dropping. In IP packet header ECN bits can be added as a sign of congestion thus avoiding needless packet drops. The proposed ECN and AQM mechanism can be implemented with help of ns2 simulator and the performance can be tested on different TCP variants.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.41
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• pp.113-140
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• 2015

This paper explains how the basic and instinctive emotion "joy" is verbally expressed in Russian and Korean. In particular, the main concern of this pater is on the cultural context with which the emotion "joy" is related and the ways in which the emotion "joy" has a wide range of uses. The semantic and pragmatic characteristics of the uses of the expression "joy" can be explained through the cultural and historical backgrounds in both languages. In Russian, joy has two variants, radost' and udovol'stvie. It is very difficult to distinguish a significant difference between them; however, the former is mainly connected with more mental, spiritual, cultural, and religious contexts, whereas the latter is mainly related with more concrete, instantaneous contexts and daily life. The former produces an impression that has a more wide, spiritual, and macroscopic attitude toward a situation, whereas the latter produces an impression that has a microscopic and instantaneous attitude toward a situation. Compared with the Russian expressions, the Korean equivalents, 기쁨 and 즐거움, have a very similar opposition like that of the Russian. The former is based on a more logical and causal relation between an anticipation or desire and the current situations, whereas the latter is based on the participation of speakers in a situation and has a very instantaneous characteristic, like a udovol'stvie in Russian. Thus, it can be reasonable argued that the Russian udovol'stvie and the Korean 즐거움 share many similar semantic properties. In brief summary, in both languages there exists two distinctive variants that show a privative opposition to express the emotional concept of joy.

• The Plant Pathology Journal
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• v.28 no.2
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• pp.123-136
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• 2012

Diseases caused by begomoviruses (family Geminiviridae, genus Begomovirus) constitute a serious constraint to tropical and sub-tropical agro-ecosystems worldwide. In recent years, they have also introduced in temperate regions of the world where they have great impact and are posing a serious threat to a variety of greenhouse crops. Begomoviral diseases can in extreme cases reduce yields to zero leading to catastrophic losses in agriculture. They are still evolving and pose a serious threat to sustainable agriculture across the world, particularly in tropics and sub-tropics. Till recently, there have been no records on the occurrence of begomoviral disease in South Korea, however, the etiology of other plant viral diseases are known since last century. The first begomovirus infected sample was collected from sweet potato plant in 2003 and since then there has been gradual increase in the begomoviral epidemics specially in tomato and sweet potato crops. So far, 48 begomovirus sequences originating from various plant species have been submitted in public sequence data base from different parts of the country. The rapid emergence of begomoviral epidemics might be with some of the factors like evolution of new variants of the viruses, appearance of efficient vectors, changing cropping systems, introduction of susceptible plant varieties, increase in global trade in agricultural products, intercontinental transportation networks, and changes in global climatic conditions. Another concern might be the emergence of a begomovirus complex and satellite DNA molecules. Thorough understanding of the pathosystems is needed for the designing of effective managements. Efforts should also be made towards the integration of the resistant genes for the development of transgenic plants specially tomato and sweet potato as they have been found to be widely infected in South Korea. There should be efficient surveillance for emergence or incursions of other begomoviruses and biotypes of whitefly. This review discusses the general characteristics of begomoviruses, transmission by their vector B. tabaci with an especial emphasis on the occurrence and distribution of begomoviruses in South Korea, and control measures that must be addressed in order to develop more sustainable management strategies.