Aluminum (Al) is one of the major factors adversely affects crop growth and productivity in acidic soils. In this study, the effect of Al on plants in soil was investigated by comparing the protein expression profiles of alfalfa roots exposed to Al stress treatment. Two-week-old alfalfa seedlings were exposed to Al stress treatment at pH 4.0. Total protein was extracted from alfalfa root tissue and analyzed by two-dimensional gel electrophoresis combined with MALDI-TOF/TOF mass spectrometry. A total of 45 proteins differentially expressed in Al stress-treated alfalfa root tissues were identified, of which 28 were up-regulated and 17 were down-regulated. Of the differentially expressed proteins, 7 representative proteins were further confirmed for transcript accumulation by RT-PCR analysis. The identified proteins were involved in several functional categories including disease/defense (24%), energy (22%), protein destination (9%), metabolism (7%), transcription (5%), secondary metabolism (4%), and ambiguous classification (29%). The identification of key candidate genes induced by Al in alfalfa roots will be useful to elucidate the molecular mechanisms of Al stress tolerance in alfalfa plants.

This study examined the effects of lactic acid spray, hot water spray, or their combined treatment, as well as the effects of acidified sodium chlorite (ASC), for the decontamination of Escherichia coli on beef carcass surfaces using a commercial intervention system. With this system, the effects of 2 or 4% lactic acid (v/v), hot water (89±1oC), or their combined treatment, were examined in terms of reducing inoculated E. coli. ASC (266 ppm), which was adjusted to pH 2.5 using acetic acid or citric acid, was applied using a hand-held spray system. When the beef carcasses were treated with 2 or 4% lactic acid for 10.4 s, less than 1 log reductions of inoculated E. coli were observed. A hot water spray treatment for 9.8 s resulted in a 2.1 log reduction of inoculated E. coli. However, when the hot water was followed with either 2 or 4% lactic acid, no difference in E. coli reduction was found between the hot water alone or the combined treatment with lactic acid. When ASC was adjusted to pH 2.5 with acetic acid and citric acid, 3.8 and 4.1 log reductions of E. coli were observed, respectively. Overall, the lactic acid spray treatment was least effective, and the ASC treatment was most effective, for the E. coli decontamination of beef carcasses. Therefore, these data suggest that ASC would be a more effective intervention against E. coli than most of the methods currently being used. However, more research is required to evaluate the effects of ASC on other organisms, as well as to identify application methods that will not affect meat quality.

Energy acquisition due to the increase of oil price is one of the most important issues and policy for most countries. Various tankers have been built in the world and sent to the trade market. It is necessary to build the port infrastructure and facilities to give them proper services such as mooring, packing, storing, and transshipment, etc. However, the domestic guidelines or standards for design and construction for the dolphin berth among these facilities are out of date and do not meet the recent trend of tanker types. Therefore, it requires amendment on the guidelines or standards. In this study, a detailed analysis of the tanker fleet, covering 8,000 ships under operation and order to build, is made to estimate the proper PBL(Parallel Body Length) of each tanker class. After discussion and comparison on the dolphin berth design and construction codes of various countries, those are the leading countries of tanker operation and management, suggestion was made to amend on the design code. The referred codes are of Korea, Japan, UK, USA, and Canada. The analysis of tanker fleet shows the PBL as 0.45L under the normal ballast condition. In order to verify the deduced amendment on the domestic design code for dolphin berth, it was selected one of the domestic dolphin berth, located at the Yeosu oil terminal, which is almost completed to construct. The design criteria and expected tankers to moor in that terminal were analyzed and the appropriateness and countermeasure for deficiency were summarized.