Textile Relics Conservation and Effective Cleaning Methods - Conservation of the Korean Youth Baseball Tournament Championship Flag

This study analyzes the effectiveness of the cleaning methods applied to the Korean Youth Baseball Tournament championship flag, Korean cultural asset no. 498, which is currently owned by the Korean Sports Council. This championship flag was first given to the winning baseball team during the Chosun National Athletic Meet in July, 1920 and therefore carries importance in Korean sports history. The conservation process began with the following goals: to understand the current condition of the relic, to reduce the soils, to repair and reinforce the deteriorated areas, and to prevent further major damages to the relic

Generation of a Wide-Band Response Using Early-Time and Middle-Frequency Data Throught the Use of Orthogonal Fuctions

Abstract|Generation of a wide-band response using partial information from the time domain (TD) data and frequency domain (FD) data has been accomplished in this paper through the use of three different orthogonal functions, such as the continuous Laguerre functions, the Bessel-Chebyshev functions, and the associate Hermite functions. In this hybrid approach, one can generate the early-time response using the method of marching-on-in-time (MOT) and use the method of moment (MOM) to generate the middle-frequency response, as the low-frequency data may be unstable. Since the early-time and the middle-frequency data are mutually complimentary, they can provide the missing low- and high-frequency response and the late- time response, respectively. Even though obtaining middle-frequency response from an object needs more computation time than the low- frequency response, this approach has better performance for the interpolation and extrapolation of a wide-band response

Exploring valid reference genes for gene expression studies in Brachypodium distachyon by real-time PCR

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The wild grass species <it>Brachypodium distachyon </it>(Brachypodium hereafter) is emerging as a new model system for grass crop genomics research and biofuel grass biology. A draft nuclear genome sequence is expected to be publicly available in the near future; an explosion of gene expression studies will undoubtedly follow. Therefore, stable reference genes are necessary to normalize the gene expression data.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>A systematic exploration of suitable reference genes in Brachypodium is presented here. Nine reference gene candidates were chosen, and their gene sequences were obtained from the Brachypodium expressed sequence tag (EST) databases. Their expression levels were examined by quantitative real-time PCR (qRT-PCR) using 21 different Brachypodium plant samples, including those from different plant tissues and grown under various growth conditions. Effects of plant growth hormones were also visualized in the assays. The expression stability of the candidate genes was evaluated using two analysis software packages, geNorm and NormFinder. In conclusion, the ubiquitin-conjugating enzyme 18 gene (<it>UBC18</it>) was validated as a suitable reference gene across all the plant samples examined. While the expression of the polyubiquitin genes (<it>Ubi4 </it>and <it>Ubi10</it>) was most stable in different plant tissues and growth hormone-treated plant samples, the expression of the S-adenosylmethionine decarboxylase gene (<it>SamDC</it>) ranked was most stable in plants grown under various environmental stresses.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>This study identified the reference genes that are most suitable for normalizing the gene expression data in Brachypodium. These reference genes will be particularly useful when stress-responsive genes are analyzed in order to produce transgenic plants that exhibit enhanced stress resistance.</p