As demands of microrobots increases, micro-actuators for lhe microrobots are actively studied. However, miniaturized motors cannot be easily applied 10 microrobots owing to lhe limitatioJ1s of lheir sizes antd generating forces. Therefore, a new smart material for microrobots should be developed. A mong various smart materials, such as PZT, SMA, Ferrofluid, we focused on a ferropaper actuator using ferrof1uid. The ferropaper actuator is regarded as a smart mater ial and can show large displacemenls, excellent repetilion perfonnances, and relative small actuation forces. In lhis paper, a cellulose is used 10 make a backbone membrane because il has superior properties compared with any others conventional papers. The cellulose paper backbone membrane is easily fabricated as complex shapes and shows a large displacement in a magnetic tield. In detail, patterned ferropaper actuator is made of cellulose acetate using general MEMs procedure and PDMS molding method. Finally, through EDS mapping and alignment experiments of the làbricated ferropaper actuator using an electromagnetic actuation (EMA) system, the patterned ferropaper actuator was characterized.

Plant breeding requires genetic diversity of useful traits for crop improvement. EMS-induced mutation is practiced to generate mutations at loci regulating economically important traits and/or to knock out the genes to elucidate their functions. The present study was aimed to induce mutations in a Korean local land race Capsicum annuum ‘Yuwol-cho’. This accession is pungent and also has advantage to mature early. A total of about 1,500 M2 families were screened and three non-pungent mutants were identified and crossed with wild type ‘Yuwol-cho’. After phenotyping of F2 population for pungency, MutMap approach will be used to identify the genes controlling the pungency in mutants. In addition to this, another C. annuum accession “Micro-Pep” was used to develop a mutant population. Micro-Pep is a small, pungent pepper generally used as ornamental purpose. Having compact growth habit, and small size, it has advantage to handle and utilize easily in mutation study and molecular research. On the basis of preliminary experiment 1.3% of mutagen was used for treatment of pepper seeds and 30% less germination percentage was observed in EMS treated seeds in comparison to control seeds. A total of 4,674 M1 plants are grown under greenhouse condition and M2 population will be studied for characterization of phenotypic variation including fruit color and pungency. Newly constructed mutant populations will be valuable assets for identification of functional genes and molecular breeding of pepper.

Mutant lines induced by ethyl methane sulfonate (EMS) have been used for crop improvement and functional genomics. Since pepper is very recalcitrant to be transformed, EMS mutagenesis could be an alternative method to generate useful mutant lines and to characterize the function of genes. We have developed mutant lines consisting of about 3,938 M2 mutant lines using Korea local landrace, C. annuum ‘Yuwolcho’. Yuwolcho has suitable traits for mutagenesis such as early flowering and maturation, large number of seeds per fruit, and susceptibility to various diseases. Up to now, 917 M2 mutant lines were evaluated to confirm the effect of EMS. M2 mutant lines have shown variations in plant stature (small size, dwarfism, and early death), leaf development (light color, variegation and morphological change) and flower (inflorescence, morphological change) and fruit (size and color). We observed the largest morphological variation in leaf development. Most of these mutant phenotypes were inherited recessively. In addition, we are applying cel1-based TILLING to identify useful mutant lines. We will apply cel1-based TILLING to identify useful mutant lines. We are expecting that these mutant lines will be very useful to study the function of genes in C. annuum.

Mutant populations generated by ethyl methanesulfonate (EMS) have been used for crop improvement and functional genomics. Since pepper is very recalcitrant to be transformed, EMS mutagenesis can be a very useful to generate useful alleles and to characterize the function of genes. We have been developing a mutant population aiming at 5,000 mutants by treating EMS on seeds of C. annuum ‘Yuwolcho’. A total of 4,300 M1 mutants have been developed until now. Among the 4,300 M1 population, almost 800 M2 mutant lines have been phenotyped and evaluated to confirm the effect of EMS. We categorized seven key organ development and subdivided them into twenty secondary categories. Among them, 50 and 72 families have been shown variations in plant growth and leaf development, respectively. In addition, we detected nucleotide variations using HRM analysis in eIF4E and putative aminotransferase genes. These results demonstrated that our mutant population can be very useful for study function of genes in near future.