Purpose – This study investigated the effects of leaders of national universities on faculty creativity. The study examined transformational leadership and creativity theories and investigated self-efficacy, the parameter between transformational leadership and creativity, to examine its moderating effect and provide policy implications for national universities. Research design, data, and methodology – This study built four hypotheses based on the literature review, and tested these using a survey methodology. The collected data were analyzed using SPSS 15.0. Result – At the national universities, the results were as follows: charisma of leaders had a positive influence on member creativity; intellectual stimulus of leaders had a positive influence on member creativity; and, individual consideration of leaders had a positive influence on member creativity. Therefore, leaders’ transformational leadership had a positive influence on member creativity. Conclusion – Creativity is thought to be important for organizational survival and continuous development at rapidly changing education administrations. Educational administration leaders should exercise transformational leadership to develop member creativity. Member self-efficacy, which had a mediating effect on creativity, requires leadership to develop it.

For purposes of studying intron structures and predicting consensus splice motifs, a total of 102 legume species were used to isolate introns across the family. Of 196 gene-targeted PCR primer pairs, we successfully amplified 118 intron-containing genes (60.2%) and obtained a total of 1,870 introns with an average size of 143 nucleotides. Species-based compilation of 5’- and 3’-splicing motifs showed lineage-specific conservation in each splicing motif. Compilation of the entire intron set permitted prediction of the consensus sequences of splicing signal motifs in legumes, AYGWGTABABGH and TVNC/TAGGHTV for the 5’- and 3’-splicing motifs, respectively. Interestingly, these consensus motifs are very similar to the corresponding splicing signals of two model systems, Arabidopsis and rice. This result is suggestive of conservation of pre-mRNA splicing mechanisms in higher plants. Multiple alignments of CALTL introns demonstrated that the region from the branch point to 3’ splice site was relatively more conserved than the region from5’ splice site to the branch point. Phylogenetic analysis demonstrated that each of three splicing motifs, 5’-splice sites, 3’-splice sits, and branch site, was relevant to evolutionary divergence of species and phylogenetically informative, suggesting that splice signal sequences would be useful as a potential tool for the molecular phylogenetic analysis.

Genetic markers are tools that can facilitate molecular breeding, even in species lacking genomic resources. An important class of genetic markers is those based on orthologous genes, because they can guide hypotheses about conserved gene function. For under-studied species a key bottleneck in gene-based marker development is the need to develop molecular tools that reliably access genes with orthology to the genomes of well-characterized reference species. Here we report an efficient platform for designing cross-species gene-derived markers in legumes. The automated platform, named CSGM Designer (URL: http://tgil.donga.ac.kr/CSGMdesigner), facilitates rapid and systematic design of cross-species genic markers. The underlying database is composed of genome data from five legume species whose genomes are substantially characterized. Use of CSGM designer is enhanced by graphical displays of query results, which we describe as “circular viewer” and “search-within-results” functions. CSGM platform provides a virtual PCR representation, called eHT-PCR, that predicts the specificity of each primer pair simultaneously in multiple genomes. CSGM Designer output was experimentally validated for the amplification of orthologous genes using 16 genotypes representing 12 crop and model legume species, distributed among the galegoid and phaseoloid clades. Successful cross-species amplification was obtained for 85.3% of PCR primer combinations. CSGM Designer spans the divide between well-characterized crop and model legume species and their less well-characterized relatives. The outcome is PCR primers that target highly conserved genes for polymorphism discovery, enabling functional inferences and ultimately facilitating trait-associated molecular breeding.

Ceramic welding backing material is a mullite-cordierite composite that is currently being used for welding processes in plant and shipbuilding. It is the optimal material for welding processes thanks to its extremely low thermal expansion coefficient and strong resilience against high temperature. However, due to the pollutants from welding such as iron and carbon, the entire amount of ceramic welding backing material is being land-filled after a single-time use. In this study, ceramic welding backing material was mixed with clay and kaolin to be used as a new ceramic body. A composition with 20 ~ 50% of ceramic welding backing material showed sufficient plasticity, and when fired at 1,250oC, it was deemed available for ceramic block and others with the porosity of 2.27 ~ 5.94%, water absorption ratio of 0.99 ~ 3.96% and bending strength of 720 ~ 810 kgf/cm2. In addition, color ceramic body, which was made from a waste welding backing material, of which iron was partially removed, added with 3wt% of high temperature pigment and fired at 1,250oC, displayed the unique color of the pigment, meaning that waste welding backing material could be used for ceramic bodies of a variety of colors.

We investigated how supercritical affected sterilization and enzyme inactivation in dongchimi, a conventional Korean fermented food. The growth of bacteria, including lactic acid bacteria, in dongchimi juice tended to decrease with increased pressure and temperature during treatment with supercritical . D values were affected by pressure more than by temperature. The lowest total number of cells and D values of lactic acid bacteria were observed after treatment with supercritical at 25 MPa and ; these conditions also reduced polygalacturonase activity in radishes by approximately 40.3%. Supercritical can be used as an alternative method of sterilization and enzyme inactivation, minimizing sensory loss and textural changes in vegetable materials.