As many existing research fields are matured academically, researchers have encountered numbers of academic, social and other problems that cannot be addressed by internal knowledge and methodologies of existing disciplines. Earlier, pioneers of researchers thus are following a new paradigm that breaks the boundaries between the prior disciplines, fuses them and seeks new approaches. Moreover, developed countries including Korea are actively supporting and fostering the convergence research at the national level. Nevertheless, there is insufficient research to analyze convergence trends in national R&D support projects and what kind of content the projects mainly deal with. This study, therefore, collected and preprocessed the research proposal data of National Research Foundation of Korea, transforming the proposal documents to term-frequency matrices. Based on the matrices, this study derived detailed research topics through Latent Dirichlet Allocation, a kind of topic modeling algorithm. Next, this study identified the research topics each proposal mainly deals with, visualized the convergence relationships, and quantitatively analyze them. Specifically, this study analyzed the centralities of the detailed research topics to derive clues about the convergence of the near future, in addition to visualizing the convergence relationship and analyzing time-varying number of research proposals per each topic. The results of this study can provide specific insights on the research direction to researchers and monitor domestic convergence R&D trends by year.

The Maillard Reaction Products (MRPs) such as Glucose-tyrosine (Glu-Tyr) and Xylose-arginine (Xyl-Arg) have antioxidant, antimutagenic, and antibacterial effects. However, to date, still little is known about the other biological effects of the MRPs. In this study, we investigated whether the fructose-tyrosine MRP, 2,4-bis(p-hydroxyphenyl)-2-butenal (Fru-Tyr), could modulate cell cycle progression and NF-κB activity, and thereby induce apoptotic cell death of colon cancer cells. Treatment with different concentrations (10-40 μg/ ml) of Fru-Tyr for 24 h inhibited colon cancer cell (SW620 and HCT116) growth followed by induction of G₂/M phase cell cycle arrest and apoptosis in a dose-dependent manner. We also found that Fru-Tyr suppressed tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-α)-induced NF-κB transcriptional activity. Moreover, Fru-Tyr induced the expression of apoptotic gene, cleaved caspse-3. These results suggest that Fru-Tyr inhibited colon cancer cell growth through induction of G₂/M phase cell cycle arrest and apoptotic cell death by modulating of NF-κB.

Hereditary dentin defects consist of dentin dysplasia(DD) and dentinogenesis imperfecta(DI). The DI associated with osteogenesis imperfecta has been classified as DI type I, whereas isolated inherited defects have been categorized as DI types II and III. However, whether DI type III should be considered a distinct phenotype or a variation of DI type II is debatable. Recent genetic findings have focused attention on the role of the dentin sialophosphoprotein(DSPP) gene in the etiology of inherited defects of tooth dentin. We have identified a novel mutation(c.727G → A, p.D243N) at the 243th codon of exon 4 of the DSPP gene in a Korean patient with DI type III. The radiographic and histologic features of the patient revealed the classic phenotype of shell teeth. These findings suggest that DI type II and III are not separate diseases but rather the phenotypic variation of a single disease.

The present work has been devoted to the catalytic reduction of N2O by H2 with Pt/SiO2 catalysts at very low temperatures, such as 110oC, and their nanoparticle sizes have been determined by using H2-N2O titration, X-ray diffraction(XRD) and high-resolution transmission electron microscopy(HRTEM) measurements. A sample of 1.72% Pt/SiO2, which had been prepared by an ion exchange method, consisted of almost atomic levels of Pt nanoparticles with 1.16 nm that are very consistent with the HRTEM measurements, while a Pt/SiO2 catalyst possessing the same Pt amount via an incipient wetness technique did 13.5 nm particles as determined by the XRD measurements. These two catalysts showed a noticeable difference in the on-stream deN2O activity maintenance profiles at 110℃. This discrepancy was associated with the nanoparticle sizes, i.e., the Pt/SiO2 catalyst with the smaller particle size was much more active for the N2O reduction. When repeated measurements of the N2O reduction with the 1.16 nm Pt catalyst at 110oC were allowed, the catalyst deactivation occurred, depending somewhat on regeneration excursions.

A new single cross waxy corn (Zea mays L.) hybrid, “Miheugchal” with black kernel was developed by the Maize Experiment Station (MES), Gangwon-do Agricultural Research and Extension Services (GARES) in 2004. This hybrid, which has good eating quality and