Injection of nematicides such as emamectin benzonate and milbemectin is the most common practice to control the pinewood nematode, Bursaphelenchus xylophilus, in Korea. These macrocyclolactone nematicides, however, are expensive, limiting their practicability despite of high efficacy. In an attempt to screen affordable alternative organophosphate (OP) and carbamate (CB) nematicides, we identified and characterized three acetylcholinesterases (ACE, EC 3.1.1.7) from B. xylophilus and functionally expressed them using baculovirus system. In inhibition assay using 11 OPs and 3 CBs, all the three ACEs were highly inhibited by paraoxon, DDVP, chlorpyrifos-oxon and mevinphos of OPs and carbofuran and carbaryl of CBs but not inhibited well by the others. Interestingly, inhibition assay revealed that BxACE-3 is less sensitive to all insecticides tested than other two ACEs. In additional bioassay, chlorpyrifos, DDVP and parathion showed a high LC50 but all CBs tested did a very low mortality. The inhibition kinetic data and bioassay data obtained in this study should provide essential information for the development of OP-based nematicidal agents against B. xylophilus. Availability of expressed ACE will also facilitate the development of in vitro screening system to develop potential OP nematicides.

The pinewood nematode, Bursaphelenchus xylophilus (Steinner & Buhrer) Nickle, has two different life stages according to several environmental factors: dispersal stage and propagative stages. The dispersal stage is closely related to the migration to other host pines, whereas the propagative stage is coupled to the direct cause of pine wilt. To establish expressed sequence tag (EST) database of two life cycles of B. xylophilus, subtractive EST libraries were constructed using suppressed subtractive hybridization (SSH). From 3,072 and 3,840 sequences of dispersal- and propagative-specific stage cDNA libraries, 1,927 and 2,604 clusters were generated, respectively, which were annotated by BLASTx and Gene ontology (GO). A total of 1,112 (57.7%) and 1,215 (46.7%) clusters from the dispersal- and propagative-specific stage cDNA libraries respectively had the matched BLASTx hits (E≤10-2), among which 913 (47.4%) and 960 (36.9%) were classified into three categories in Gene ontology. From GO database, some respective stage-specific genes were searched and estimated the relative transcripts level according to stages using the quantitative real-time PCR.

Analysis of lunar samples returned by the US Apollo missions revealed that the lunar highlands consist of anorthosite, plagioclase, pyroxene, and olivine; also, the lunar maria are composed of materials such as basalt and ilmenite. More recently, the remote sensing approach has enabled reduction of the time required to investigate the entire lunar surface, compared to the approach of returning samples. Moreover, remote sensing has also made it possible to determine the existence of specific minerals and to examine wide areas. In this paper, an investigation was performed on the reflectance distribution and its trend. The results were applied to the example of the double ray stretched in parallel lines from the Tycho crater to the third-quadrant of Mare Nubium. Basic research and background information for the investigation of lunar surface characteristics is also presented. For this research, resources aboard the SELenological and ENgineering Explorer (SELENE), a Japanese lunar probe, were used. These included the Multiband Imager (MI) in the Lunar Imager / Spectrometer (LISM). The data of these instruments were edited through the toolkit, an image editing and analysis tool, Exelis Visual Information Solution (ENVI).