There are a lot of types of wild vegetables such as Colocasia esculenta (L.) Schott stem in Korea. However, the consumption of these wild vegetables is restricted because their storage decreased dramatically after harvest. To maintain original quality of vegetables, pre-treatments such as blanching and drying are important. But conditions for these treatments were still not optimized for many vegetables including Colocasia esculenta (L.) Schott stem. Thus, the objective of this study was to set up an optimal pre-treatment method for freezing storage. Colocasia esculenta (L.) Schott stems were peeled and cut equally (10 cm) for sample preparation. Dried samples (D) were dried at 90℃ for 3 h. Blanched samples (B) were blanched in hot water at 100℃ for 2 min. Blanched and dried samples (BD) were blanched and dried as same protocol. Physicochemical properties were analyzed to evaluate the quality including texture, moisture content, total color difference and viable cell count. Raw sample had 6.85 kg/cm 3 of hardness and 78.75 of chewiness whereas B was 6.83 kg/cm 3 of hardness and 7.8 of chewiness. B had the similar value compared to raw samples. Moisture content of raw sample was 94.4% and that of B was 94.1%, though there were not any significant differences between them. ΔE value of B showed lower value than those of the others. Viable cell counts and total coliforms were not detected after treatment, while raw sample had 5.39 log CFU/g of viable cell count without total coliform. Therefore, pre-treatments are essential for microbial safety of samples. All results considered, it is supposed that blanching is the optimal pre-treatment to sustain its original quality of Colocasia esculenta (L.) Schott stems before freezing.

Spatiotemporal expressions of microRNAs (miRNAs) are altered by the physiological states of cells which could be influenced by microenvironment. Function of miRNAs has been focused as a new regulator of gene expressions and cell differentiation in human health and diseases. We found and identified the several miRNAs, which were related to developmental competence of preimplantation and implantation process of mouse blastocysts and outgrowth embryos by microarray-based bioinformatical studies. In this study, we evaluated three miRNAs expressions related to third cleavage event in conditioned media (CM) and blastocysts. Mouse 2-cell stage embryos were collected and monitored for 9 hours. The embryos were divided two groups as early third cleavage before 9 hours of collection and late third cleavage after 9 hours of collection. They were cultured to blastocyst stage up to day-5 after hCG injection. The total number of cells and the number of cells with fragmented DNA were assessed in blastocysts by terminal dUTP nick-end labelling (TUNEL) staining and DAPI staining. Mean cell number of early third cleavage group was significantly higher than that of late third cleavage group (105.3±8.0 vs 81.8±7.0, p<0.05), but apoptotic index was not different. The miRNAs of CM and blastocysts from early and late group were prepared, and quantified by qRT-PCR with TaqMan probes. The expression levels of three miRNAs (mmu-let-7b, mmu-miR-183, and mmu-miR-429) in CM and blastocysts were slightly upregulated in late third cleavage group. Our study suggested that the expression level of miRNAs could be altered with embryo quality, and miRNAs in CM may be used to predict miRNAs expression of embryos and developmental competence.