Sessile organism, plants constitutively challenged with pathogens have been developed various strategies for protection, such as preformed and inducible defense mechanisms. Receptor-like Proteins(RLPs) play critical roles in defense response as well as in plant development and growth. The domain structure of RLPs consists of extracellular leucine–rich repeats, a transmembrane domain, and a short cytoplasmic tail. Here, we identified putative 170 RLP genes from pepper genome using in-house bioinformatics pipeline. The distribution of RLPs on pepper pseudomolecule showed uneven spread and a number of RLPs were physically clustered by tandem array in the specific chromosome. Motifs analysis of pepper RLPs showed conserved LRR sequences (LxxLxxLDLxxNxxxGxIP). To understand further functional and evolutionary characteristics, evolutional relationship and gene profiling analysis are on progress.

Three hundred thousand tons per year of water works sludge are produced in Korea. End disposal of the sludge is mainly based on recycle such as supplementary material for cement kiln, raw material for construction materials and fill material. The dry clarifier sludge organic content is about 30% and the major elements determined are aluminum(about 14%), iron(about 4%), potassium(1.8%), and manganese(0.5%). The recovery of coagulant has high economic advantage and recommended as a suitable treatment option for the disposal of water works sludge. Chemically, coagulant(aluminum) recovery from the water works sludge is a simple process. This process is however, somewhat complicated by pH control in the mixture of dewatered clarifier sludge and sulfuric acid solution. Also, the thickened water works sludge(TWS), which is withdrawn from the bottom of the thickener in water works plant, is difficult to dewater. In addition coagulation is used to remove total phosphorus(T-P) from municipal wastewater in oder to strengthening discharge water quality standard for T-P in municipal wastewater treatment plant(MWTP). Nevertheless it has the drawback of producing a large amount of sludge which together with the coagulants such as alum and polyaluminum chloride used to treat T-P in municipal wastewater increases the operating cost. Reject water originates from the dewatering of digested sludge in the MWTP. It contains heavy metals and large amounts of nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen. Traditionally, reject water is recycled back to the main flow line on of the MWTP. Although this method seems to be simple, it also has its drawbacks. First of which is the increase in the load of the MWTP as the reject water characteristics is very much different from the normal municipal wastewater. The objective of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of thickened water works sludge as an adsorbent of phosphorus from the reject water. In this study, batches of experiments were conducted to investigate the effect of dosage of TWS for reject water on its phosphorus adsorption properties. Increasing the TWS dosage to 30%(vol/vol), T-P and COD of reject water decreased to 55% and 20% respectively. Experimental results show that the potential of the TWS as coagulant in phosphorus and organic matter immobilization, thus converting they from rejector water to a useful material in pollutant control.

Platycodon grandiflorum, which is the only species in the genus Platycodon of the family Campanulaceae, is an herbaceous flowering perennial. P. grandiflorum is generally known as bellflower or balloon flower indicating its ornamental uses. It has also been traditionally used as a medicinal crop in East Asia, which is widely employed as an antiphlogistic, antitussive, and expectorant. However, marker-assisted selection and molecular breeding in P. grandiflorum has lagged behind other plants such as pepper and tomato because of the lack of genetic information and effective molecular markers. Transcriptome sequencing provides an effective way to obtain large amount of sequence data when there is no available genome sequence. In this study, we performed a transcriptome analysis in platycodons, which has not been attempted previously. We analyzed simple sequence repeats (SSRs) using RNA-seq data. Di-nucleotide motifs were the most abundant repeats (39% ~ 40%) followed by mono- (26% ~ 32%), tri- (25% ~ 31%), tetra- (1.5% ~ 1.9 %), penta- (0.3% ~ 1%) in three platycodon accessions. Based on the SNP information obtained from RNA-seq analysis, we developed 12 PCR-based markers in Platycodon. The number of alleles ranged from two to seven with the average PIC value of 0.373. These 12 markers were applied to 21 platycodon accessions and a phylogenetic tree was constructed. The markers developed in this study could be introduced in molecular breeding program of platycodons. The SSR information obtained from RNA-seq analysis could be further utilized for developing genic-SSR markers in platycodons. Since platycodon is considered as an orphan crop, which has not been actively deployed for genetic study, the sequence information obtained from this study will contribute to further genetic improvements, genomic information and gene discovery in platycodon