Microspore derived embryo formation and doubled haploid plant production in broccoli (Brassica oleracea L. var italica) according to nutritional and environmental conditions

In cell culture, the maintenance of proper growing conditions is a key approach for improving the formation of embryos, and is useful in the production of doubled haploid (DH) plants. Optimal nutritional and environmental conditions for the microspore culture of Brassica oleracea L. var italica were determined in order to reduce time and effort in breeding. The optimal conditions for microspore embryo formation differed depending on genotype. Microspore-derived embryos (MDE) formation was influenced by the strength of the NLN medium, the microelement and sugar concentration, and the heat shock temperature and period. The 0.5XNLN liquid medium was the most favorable for MDE formation. The most efficient formation of MDE was observed in the 0.5X NLN liquid medium, without the addition of microelements. When 13 or 15% sucrose was added to the 0.5X NLN liquid medium, the amount of normal MDE formation increased. The optimum heat shock temperature and period for MDE formation was 32.5°C and 24 h, respectively. A polyploidy test indicated that 30% of the microspore derived plants were diploid throughout the embryogenesis process.Key words: Embryogenesis, heat shock, microelements, NLN medium, polyploidy test

A Dynamic Resource Manager with Effective Resource Isolation Based on Workload Types in Virtualized Cloud Computing Environments

To use computing resources for processing parallel algorithms on demand, cloud computing has been widely used since it is able to scale in response to load increases and decreases. Typically, cloud computing providers offer virtual machines to cloud users with static configurations, and these configurations are not changed until virtual machines are shutting down. To accelerate parallel processing computations in cloud computing environments, we design and implement a dynamic resource manager by isolating resources based on workload types. To avoid unnecessary context switching and increase CPUs affinity, our dynamic resource manager determines whether vCPU to physical CPU core pinning is required. If so, the VM’s vCPUs are pinned by our dynamic resource manager, which can guarantee the resource and performance isolation. With our proposed resource manager for virtual machines, we can achieve a performance boost and load balancing at the same time. Performance results show that our proposed method outperforms the default scheduler of Xen about 36.2% by reducing the number of context switching for VMs

Bacterial profile of suction drains and the relationship thereof to surgical-site infections in prosthetic breast reconstruction

Background Despite the increasing popularity of prosthetic breast reconstruction, scant data exist on the microbiological profile of drainage fluid from closed-suction drains and the relationship thereof to surgical-site infections (SSIs) in breast reconstruction surgery. This study aimed to determine whether bacteria isolated from drainage fluid were associated with the development of SSIs, and whether the bacterial profile of drainage fluid could be a clinically useful predictor of SSIs. Methods We performed a retrospective chart review of 61 women who underwent tissue expander/implant or direct-to-implant reconstructions. Patient demographics and culture studies of drainage fluid from suction drains collected on postoperative day 7 were evaluated. Results Sixteen patients (26.23%) were culture-positive, and 45 patients (73.77%) were culture-negative. The most frequently isolated bacteria were coagulase-negative staphylococci, followed by Staphylococcus aureus. SSIs were diagnosed in seven patients and were mostly resolved by systemic antibiotics; however, the tissue expander or implant was explanted in two patients. Positive culture of drainage fluid from closed-suction drains was significantly associated with the development of SSIs (P<0.05). The positive predictive value was 37.50%,and the negative predictive value was 97.78%. Conclusions To our knowledge, this study is the first to demonstrate a significant association between the microbiological profile of drainage fluid from closed-suction drains and the development of SSIs in patients with prosthetic breast reconstructions. The high negative predictive value suggests that microbial testing of drainage fluid from closed-suction drains may have clinical utility. Further prospective studies with larger sample sizes are required to confirm our findings

Analysis of the Penn Korean Universal Dependency Treebank (PKT-UD): Manual Revision to Build Robust Parsing Model in Korean

In this paper, we first open on important issues regarding the Penn Korean Universal Treebank (PKT-UD) and address these issues by revising the entire corpus manually with the aim of producing cleaner UD annotations that are more faithful to Korean grammar. For compatibility to the rest of UD corpora, we follow the UDv2 guidelines, and extensively revise the part-of-speech tags and the dependency relations to reflect morphological features and flexible word-order aspects in Korean. The original and the revised versions of PKT-UD are experimented with transformer-based parsing models using biaffine attention. The parsing model trained on the revised corpus shows a significant improvement of 3.0% in labeled attachment score over the model trained on the previous corpus. Our error analysis demonstrates that this revision allows the parsing model to learn relations more robustly, reducing several critical errors that used to be made by the previous model.Comment: Accepted by The 16th International Conference on Parsing Technologies, IWPT 202

The Significance of Gastric Juice Analysis for a Positive Challenge by a Standard Oral Challenge Test in Typical Cow's Milk Protein-Induced Enterocolitis

This study was performed to investigate the significance of gastric juice analysis (GJA) as a diagnostic criterion of a positive challenge in a standard oral cow's milk challenge (OCC) to confirm typical cow's milk protein-induced enterocolitis (CMPIE). Data from 16 CMPIE patients (aged 14 to 44 days) were analyzed. A standard OCC was openly executed using 0.15 g/kg of protein. Three symptoms (vomiting, lethargy, and bloody or pus-like stool), and four laboratory findings (GJA [3 hr], changes in peripheral blood absolute neutrophil count [ANC] [6 hr], C-reactive protein [6 hr], and stool smear test for occult blood or leukocytes) were observed after OCC. Before OCC, baseline studies were conducted; a stool smear test, blood sampling, and GJA. Positive OCC results were; vomiting (87.5%) (observed 1-3 hr after OCC), lethargy (62.5%) (1-3 hr), bloody or pus-like stool (43.8%) (6-10 hr), abnormal GJA (93.8%), an ANC rise >3,500 cells/µL (93.8%), and an abnormal stool smear test (75.0%). A single GJA test after a standard OCC is a sensitive diagnostic criterion of a positive challenge, and may provide an early confirmatory diagnosis of CMPIE. An investigation of positive OCC outcomes helps to find out a diagnostic algorithm of criteria of a positive challenge in CMPIE

The Prevalence of Hepatitis C Virus Infection in Korea: Pooled Analysis

This study evaluated the prevalence of hepatitis C virus (HCV) infections in Korea. Pooled estimates of the anti-HCV positivity were calculated using the data published in 15 reports on the general population and health check-up examinees. The overall pooled estimate of the prevalence of HCV among middle-aged adults (40 yr old and above) was 1.68% (95% confidence interval: 1.51-1.86%) during the year of 1990-2000 among the general population. Most of the published data indicated that the prevalence of anti-HCV increased with age. The anti-HCV positivity was significantly higher in females than in males. Because the risk of HCV exposure in blood recipients has decreased remarkably, the spread of HCV through means other than a transfusion must be prevented

Two-stage learning-based prediction of bronchopulmonary dysplasia in very low birth weight infants: a nationwide cohort study

IntroductionThe aim of this study is to develop an enhanced machine learning-based prediction models for bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD) and its severity through a two-stage approach integrated with the duration of respiratory support (RSd) using prenatal and early postnatal variables from a nationwide very low birth weight (VLBW) infant cohort.MethodsWe included 16,384 VLBW infants admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) of the Korean Neonatal Network (KNN), a nationwide VLBW infant registry (2013–2020). Overall, 45 prenatal and early perinatal clinical variables were selected. A multilayer perceptron (MLP)-based network analysis, which was recently introduced to predict diseases in preterm infants, was used for modeling and a stepwise approach. Additionally, we applied a complementary MLP network and established new BPD prediction models (PMbpd). The performances of the models were compared using the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) values. The Shapley method was used to determine the contribution of each variable.ResultsWe included 11,177 VLBW infants (3,724 without BPD (BPD 0), 3,383 with mild BPD (BPD 1), 1,375 with moderate BPD (BPD 2), and 2,695 with severe BPD (BPD 3) cases). Compared to conventional machine learning (ML) models, our PMbpd and two-stage PMbpd with RSd (TS-PMbpd) model outperformed both binary (0 vs. 1,2,3; 0,1 vs. 2,3; 0,1,2 vs. 3) and each severity (0 vs. 1 vs. 2 vs. 3) prediction (AUROC = 0.895 and 0.897, 0.824 and 0.825, 0.828 and 0.823, 0.783, and 0.786, respectively). GA, birth weight, and patent ductus arteriosus (PDA) treatment were significant variables for the occurrence of BPD. Birth weight, low blood pressure, and intraventricular hemorrhage were significant for BPD ≥2, birth weight, low blood pressure, and PDA ligation for BPD ≥3. GA, birth weight, and pulmonary hypertension were the principal variables that predicted BPD severity in VLBW infants.ConclusionsWe developed a new two-stage ML model reflecting crucial BPD indicators (RSd) and found significant clinical variables for the early prediction of BPD and its severity with high predictive accuracy. Our model can be used as an adjunctive predictive model in the practical NICU field

Rapidly Progressive Pericardial Effusion and Cardiac Tamponade in a Term Infant with an Umbilical Venous Catheter: A Case Report

Pericardial effusion (PCE) in neonates has various clinical presentations depending on the amount and speed of fluid accumulation and can cause cardiac tamponade (CT). We report a case of rapidly accumulating PCE and near-fatal CT with an umbilical venous catheter successfully resolved by emergent echo-guided pericardiocentesis in a term infant who had been hospitalized with meconium aspiration syndrome and persistent pulmonary hypertension. This case report suggests that if a patient with an intracardiac umbilical catheter shows sudden cardiopulmonary instability, the possibility of PCE and CT should be considered. Furthermore, if necessary, emergency drainage of the PCE and removal of the umbilical catheter should be immediately performed

Long-term follow-up of Fanconi anemia: clinical manifestation and treatment outcome

PurposeThe aim of this study was to characterize Korean patients with Fanconi anemia (FA), which is a rare but very challenging genetic disease.MethodsThe medical records of 12 FA patients diagnosed at Chonnam National University Hospital from 1991 to 2012 were retrospectively reviewed.ResultsThe median age at diagnosis was 6.2 years. All patients showed evidence of marrow failure and one or more physical stigmata. Chromosome breakage tests were positive in 9 out of 11 available patients. The median follow-up duration was 69.5 months. The Kaplan-Meier (KM) survival of all patients was 83.3% at 10 years and 34.7% at 20 years, respectively. Seven patients underwent 9 stem cell transplantations (SCTs). Among them, 5 were alive by the end of the study. Ten-year KM survival after SCT was 71.4% with a median follow-up of 3.4 years. All 5 patients treated with supportive treatment alone died of infection or progression at the median age of 13.5 years, except for one with short follow-up duration. Acute leukemia developed in 2 patients at 15.4 and 18.1 years of age. Among 6 patients who are still alive, 3 had short stature and 1 developed insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus.ConclusionWe provide information on the long-term outcomes of FA patients in Korea. A nation-wide FA registry that includes information of the genotypes of Korean patients is required to further characterize ethnic differences and provide the best standard of care for FA patients

Potential for transmission of naturally mutated H10N1 avian influenza virus to mammalian hosts and causing severe pulmonary disease

Subtype H10 avian influenza viruses (AIV) are distributed worldwide in wild aquatic birds, and can infect humans and several other mammalian species. In the present study, we investigated the naturally mutated PB2 gene in A/aquatic bird/South Korea/SW1/2018 (A/SW1/18, H10N1), isolated from wild birds during the 2018–2019 winter season. This virus was originally found in South Korea, and is similar to isolates from mainland China and Mongolia. It had low pathogenicity, lacked a multi-basic cleavage site, and showed a binding preference for α2,3-linked sialic acids. However, it can infect mice, causing severe disease and lung pathology. SW1 was also transmitted by direct contact in ferrets, and replicated in the respiratory tract tissue, with no evidence of extrapulmonary spread. The pathogenicity and transmissibility of SW1 in mouse and ferret models were similar to those of the pandemic strain A/California/04/2009 (A/CA/04, H1N1). These factors suggest that subtype H10 AIVs have zoonotic potential and may transmit from human to human, thereby posing a potential threat to public health. Therefore, the study highlights the urgent need for closer monitoring of subtype H10 AIVs through continued surveillance of wild aquatic birds