This study deals with replacement analysis of deteriorated equipment for improving productivity of production system. Frequent breakdown of the deteriorated equipment causes a situation that reduces productivity such as low product quality, process delay, and repair cost. However, the replacement of new equipment will be required a high initial investment cost, so it is important to analysis the economic feasibility. Therefore, we analyze the effect of the production system due to the aging effect of the equipment and the feasibility of equipment replacement based on the economic analysis. The process flow, working time, logistics movement, etc. are analyzed in order to build the simulation modeling for a ship and land switchboard production system. Using numerical examples, the economic feasibility analysis of equipment replacement through replacement of existing deteriorated equipment and additional arrangement of new facilities is performed.

Globally, colon cancer is increased gradually and known as one of the major causes of cancer death. Stevia, a substitute of sugar, is known to have many components including alpha-tocopherol and anthocyanin etc, as antioxidants. This study's purpose is to investigate whether stevia plant extract can have a protective effect against colon carcinogenesis induced by azoxymethane (AOM) and dextran sodium sulfate (DSS) in mice. Total 30 male ICR mice were divided into 2 groups; AOM/DSS treatment (control group), AOM/DSS + stevia extract (0.5%, in drinking water). After acclimation for 1 week, five weeks old mice received three intraperitoneal AOM (10 mg/kg b.w.) injections weekly for 3 weeks (0–2nd weeks of the experiment) and 2% DSS as drinking water for the next one week. AIN-76A purified rodent diet and 0.5% stevia extract water were supplied to the animals for 6 weeks. The colons of mice were collected and the number of aberrant crypt foci (ACF) and aberrant crypts (ACs) in colonic mucosa were counted after staining with methylene blue. Malondialdehyde (MDA) concentration in feces were determined. The numbers of ACF and ACs were significantly (p<0.01) decreased in stevia-treated group compared with the control group. The MDA concentration in feces was also significantly (p<0.01) decreased in stevia-treated group compared with the control group. In histopathology of colonic epithelium, hyperplasia of colonic epithelium was less observed in steviatreated group. These results indicate that stevia has a protective effect against colon carcinogenesis induced by AOM/DSS in mice and further study needs to illustrate the protective mechanisms.

R genes are a key component of genetic interactions between plants and biotrophic bacteria and are known to regulate resistance against bacterial invasion. The most common R proteins contain a nucleotide-binding site and a leucine-rich repeat (NBS-LRR) domain. Some soybean NBS-LRR genes have also been reported to function in disease resistance. A total of 319 genes were determined to be putative NBS-LRR genes in the soybean genome. The number of NBS-LRR genes on each chromosome was highly correlated with the number of disease resistance QTL in the 2-Mb flanking regions of NBS-LRR genes. In addition, the recently duplicated regions contained duplicated NBS-LRR genes and duplicated disease resistance QTL, and possessed either an uneven or even number of NBS-LRR genes on each side. The significant difference in NBS-LRR gene expression between a resistant near-isogenic line (NIL) and a susceptible NIL after inoculation of Xanthomonas axonopodis pv. glycines supports the conjecture that NBS-LRR genes have disease resistance functions in the soybean genome. The number of NBS-LRR genes and disease resistance QTL in the 2-Mb flanking regions of each chromosome was significantly correlated, and several recently duplicated regions that contain NBS-LRR genes harbored disease resistance QTL for both sides. In addition, NBS-LRR gene expression was significantly different between the BLP-resistant NIL and the BLP-susceptible NIL in response to bacterial infection. From these observations, NBS-LRR genes are suggested to contribute to disease resistance in soybean. Moreover, we propose models for how NBS-LRR genes were duplicated, and apply Ks values for each NBS-LRR gene cluster.

Recent release of whole genome draft sequences in legume species have led comparative genome studies among legume plants including Glycine max, G. soja, Cajanus cajan and Medicago truncatula. The majority of comparative genomic researches have been conducted based on synteny of coding sequences and coding sequence variations may be one of major forces for speciation and evolution. However, non-coding sequences have been also reported to be important phenotypic regulators. Especially, since short sequence motifs in the promoter regions are highly conserved, they are suggested to be another resources of interests in comparative studies. In this study, we predicted the conserved short sequence motifs by BLASTN algorithm using dicot promoter database from Softberry (http://www.softberry.com). A total of 37,396 conserved short sequence motifs were identified onto 2 kb upstreams of 46,367 high confident gene model of G. max (cv. Williams 82). Meanwhile, whole genome of 7 soybean landraces (G. max) and 7 wild soybean genotypes (G. soja) were sequenced at low depth of less than ten using Illumina Hiseq 2000. Among these genotypes, nucleotide variations were identified in predicted conserved regulatory motifs by mapping of short reads to the reference genome sequence using the Samtools program (http://samtools.sourceforge.net/). Fifteen and two genes, which have SNPs in regulatory motifs and no SNP in coding sequence, were identified by comparisons of inter-species and intra-species, respectively. qRT-PCR experiments are in progress for investigating differences of these 17 genes expressions at transcriptional level.

As soybean (Glycine max) is known for its high nutritional value of oil and protein, soybean has been domesticated and cultivated by one specific character trait based on human selection. Importantly, tracing back in time where G. max and G. soja, the undomesticated ancestor of G. max have diverged plays an important role in studying of genetic diversity and in investigating the common ancestor of soybean. In this study, we sequenced 6 G. max and 6 G. soja using Illumina’s Hiseq 2000 with a low coverage sequencing technology to estimate the divergence of times between genotypes and populations. A total of the 12 genotypes were sequenced at the average depth of 6.5 and resulted 892.5 Mb and 903.3 MB consensus sequences with the coverage of 91.54% and 92.65% for G. max and G. soja, respectively. The whole genome SNP analysis showed that G. max had lower frequency levels of polymorphism (~0.1%) than G. soja (~0.25%). And, a high number of SNPs located in introns were found among 6 G. soja genotypes as SNPs were approximately twice than those found in 6 G max. The number of SNPs in G. max intronic regions was 53,134, whereas a total of 133,329 SNPs were discovered in G. soja introns. Almost an equal number of SNPs were discovered in 5’ UTR and exon regions; however, different numbers of SNP in CDS and 3′ UTR were identified. By the rate of nonsynonymous change, divergence of time between G. soja and G. max would be investigated.