Radish is an important root vegetable in the world, and many cultivars have been developed with various molecular marker systems to identify these cultivars. Recently developed markers for radish cultivar identification require only 11 primer pairs, but they still use conventional PCR with different annealing temperatures and time-consuming gel electrophoresis. To improve the genotyping method, we applied touchdown PCR with 11 primers with M13 tails among 105 radish cultivars. Touchdown PCR successfully generated amplicons in all 11 M13-tailed primers with a condition of annealing temperature starting from 55℃, decreased by 1°C and 33 cycles at 53°C. The 11 M13-tailed primers followed by fragment analysis produced 71 amplicons, which produced more amplicons than gel electrophoresis that produced 23 amplicons. Especially, simple sequence repeats produced more amplicons, 12 on average, than the other marker types. The present study requires less effort and provides more accurate results compared to genotyping using gel electrophoresis. Besides, a database can be established using digitized genotyping results among radish cultivars.

Skin-derived precursors (SKPs) have potential to differentiate to various cell types including osteoblasts, adipocytes and neurons. SKPs are a candidate for cell-based therapy since they are easily accessible and have multipotency. Most mammalian cells are exposed to a low oxygen environment with 1 to 5% O2 concentration in vivo, while 21% O2 concentration is common in in vitro culture. The difference between in vitro and in vivo O2 concentration may affect to the behavior of cultured cells. In this report, we investigated the effect of hypoxic condition on stemness and proliferation of SKPs. The results indicated that SKPs exposed to hypoxic condition for 5 days showed no change in proliferation. In terms of mRNA expression, hypoxia maintained expression of stemness markers; whereas, oncogenes, such as Klf4 and c-Myc, were downregulated, and the expression of Nestin, related to cancer migration, was also downregulated. Thus, SKPs cultured in hypoxia may reduce the risk of cancer in SKP cell-based therapy.