Inhibitory effects of Bacillus velezensis ID-A01 supernatant against Streptococcus mutans.

BACKGROUND: Dental caries is a chronic oral disease caused by microbial infections, which result in erosion of the dental enamel and cause irreversible damage. Therefore, proper disease management techniques and the creation of an environment that prevents intraoral growth and biofilm formation of Streptococcus mutans in the early stages, are crucial to prevent the potential progression of dental plaque to disease. Here, we aimed to investigate antimicrobial and antibiofilm effects of the Bacillus velezensis ID-A01 supernatant (ID23029) against S. mutans, and its inhibitory effects on acidogenesis. RESULTS: A killing kinetics assay showed a peak lethality percentage of 94.5% after 6 h of exposure to ID23029. In sucrose-exposed conditions, ID23029 inhibited lactic acid formation, preventing the pH from falling below the threshold for enamel demineralization, and inhibited up to 96.6% of biofilm formation. This effect was maintained in the presence of lysozyme. Furthermore, ID23029 retained up to 92% lethality, even at an intraoral concentration at which lysozyme is ineffective against S. mutans. CONCLUSIONS: This study demonstrates the potential of the B. velezensis ID-A01 supernatant for the prevention and treatment of dental caries. Its eventual use in dental practice is encouraged, although further studies are required to confirm its beneficial effects.

Interactive high-quality visualization of color volume datasets using GPU-based refinements of segmentation data.

Data sets containing colored anatomical images of the human body, such as Visible Human or Visible Korean, show realistic internal organ structures. However, imperfect segmentations of these color images, which are typically generated manually or semi-automatically, produces poor-quality rendering results. We propose an interactive high-quality visualization method using GPU-based refinements to aid in the study of anatomical structures. In order to represent the boundaries of a region-of-interest (ROI) smoothly, we apply Gaussian filtering to the opacity values of the color volume. Morphological grayscale erosion operations are performed to reduce the region size, which is expanded by Gaussian filtering. Pseudo-coloring and color blending are also applied to the color volume in order to give more informative rendering results. We implement these operations on GPUs to speed up the refinements. As a result, our method delivered high-quality result images with smooth boundaries and provided considerably faster refinements. The speed of these refinements is sufficient to be used with interactive renderings as the ROI changes, especially compared to CPU-based methods. Moreover, the pseudo-coloring methods used presented anatomical structures clearly.

Biotransformation of oleic acid into 10-ketostearic acid by recombinant Corynebacterium glutamicum-based biocatalyst.

OBJECTIVE: To produce 10-ketostearic acid from oleic acid. RESULTS: Oleic acid was converted to 10-ketostearic acid by a recombinant Corynebacterium glutamicum ATCC 13032 expressing oleate hydratase from Stenotrophomonas maltophilia and a secondary alcohol dehydrogenase from Micrococcus luteus under the control of a synthetic constitutive promoter. Optimal conditions for 10-ketostearic acid production were pH 7.5 and 30 °C with 5 g cells l(-1) and 2.5 g oleic acid l(-1). Under these conditions, the cells produced 1.96 g 10-ketostearic acid l(-1) from oleic acid in 6 h, with a conversion yield of 78 % (w) and a maximum volumetric productivity of 1.67 g l(-1) h(-1). CONCLUSION: This is the first report of 10-ketostearic acid production using a recombinant C. glutamicum.

Fast high-quality volume ray-casting with virtual samplings.

Volume ray-casting with a higher order reconstruction filter and/or a higher sampling rate has been adopted in direct volume rendering frameworks to provide a smooth reconstruction of the volume scalar and/or to reduce artifacts when the combined frequency of the volume and transfer function is high. While it enables high-quality volume rendering, it cannot support interactive rendering due to its high computational cost. In this paper, we propose a fast high-quality volume ray-casting algorithm which effectively increases the sampling rate. While a ray traverses the volume, intensity values are uniformly reconstructed using a high-order convolution filter. Additional samplings, referred to as virtual samplings, are carried out within a ray segment from a cubic spline curve interpolating those uniformly reconstructed intensities. These virtual samplings are performed by evaluating the polynomial function of the cubic spline curve via simple arithmetic operations. The min max blocks are refined accordingly for accurate empty space skipping in the proposed method. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm, also exploiting fast cubic texture filtering supported by programmable GPUs, offers renderings as good as a conventional ray-casting algorithm using high-order reconstruction filtering at the same sampling rate, while delivering 2.5x to 3.3x rendering speed-up.

Fast hybrid CPU- and GPU-based CT reconstruction algorithm using air skipping technique.

This paper presents a fast hybrid CPU- and GPU-based CT reconstruction algorithm to reduce the amount of back-projection operation using air skipping involving polygon clipping. The algorithm easily and rapidly selects air areas that have significantly higher contrast in each projection image by applying K-means clustering method on CPU, and then generates boundary tables for verifying valid region using segmented air areas. Based on these boundary tables of each projection image, clipped polygon that indicates active region when back-projection operation is performed on GPU is determined on each volume slice. This polygon clipping process makes it possible to use smaller number of voxels to be back-projected, which leads to a faster GPU-based reconstruction method. This approach has been applied to a clinical data set and Shepp-Logan phantom data sets having various ratio of air region for quantitative and qualitative comparison and analysis of our and conventional GPU-based reconstruction methods. The algorithm has been proved to reduce computational time to half without losing any diagnostic information, compared to conventional GPU-based approaches.

Protective effects of tyndallized Lactobacillus acidophilus IDCC 3302 against UVB­induced photodamage to epidermal keratinocytes cells.

Photoaging is a consequence of chronic exposure to ultraviolet (UV) radiation and results in skin damage. In this study, whether tyndallizate of the probiotic bacterium Lactobacillus acidophilus IDCC 3302 (ACT 3302) can protect against UVB­induced photodamage to the skin was investigated. For this, HaCaT keratinocytes were used as a model for skin photoaging. HaCaT cells were treated with ACT 3302 prior to UVB exposure and skin hydration factors and matrix metalloproteinase (MMP)­1, MMP­2, and MMP­9 levels in the culture supernatant were evaluated by ELISA. The protective effects of ACT 3302 against UVB­induced oxidative stress in HaCaT cells was also assessed by measuring superoxide dismutase and catalase activity and detecting the expression of pro­inflammatory cytokine­encoding genes and mitogen­activated protein kinase (MAPK) signaling components by reverse transcription­quantitative polymerase chain reaction and western blotting, respectively. UVB exposure increased MMP expression and MAPK activation; these changes were attenuated by pretreatment with ACT 3302. Treatment with ACT 3302 prior to UVB exposure also attenuated inflammation. These results demonstrate that tyndallized ACT 3302 can mitigate photodamage to the skin induced by UVB radiation through the suppression of MMPs and could therefore be used clinically to prevent wrinkle formation.

Skin Moisturizing and Antiphotodamage Effects of Tyndallized Lactobacillus acidophilus IDCC 3302.

Photoaging is generally the result of chronic exposure to the sun and ultraviolet (UV) radiation, which causes skin damage. In this study, we developed a UVB-induced hairless mouse model to determine whether Lactobacillus acidophilus IDCC 3302 tyndallizate (ACT3302) can enhance photodamaged skin repair. Mice (6 weeks old) were divided into six groups containing normal, UVB-treated vehicle, and UVB-treated ACT3302 (1 × 105, 1 × 106, 1 × 107, and 1 × 108 cells). Epidermal thickness was increased by UVB, but the thickening was lessened by ACT3302 as was the transepidermal water loss (TEWL). However, ACT3302 increased capacitance and decreased TEWL. Skin tissue staining to evaluate skin collagen increases in the number of skin collagen bundles in UVB-treated ACT3302 mice. UVB irradiation increased matrix metalloproteinase (MMP) and proinflammatory cytokine expression and activated mitogen-activated protein kinases in hairless mice; these changes were also attenuated by ACT3302. We conclude that ACT3302 effectively suppressed wrinkle formation induced by UVB irradiation through MMP downregulation. Therefore, ACT3302 potentially prevents skin photoaging and wrinkle formation.

Whole Cell Bioconversion of Ricinoleic Acid to 12-Ketooleic Acid by Recombinant Corynebacterium glutamicum-Based Biocatalyst.

The biocatalytic efficiency of recombinant Corynebacterium glutamicum ATCC 13032 expressing the secondary alcohol dehydrogenase of Micrococcus luteus NCTC2665 was studied. Recombinant C. glutamicum converts ricinoleic acid to a product, identified by gas chromatography/mass spectrometry as 12-ketooleic acid (12-oxo-cis-9-octadecenoic acid). The effects of pH, reaction temperature, and non-ionic detergent on recombinant C. glutamiucm whole cell bioconversion were examined. The determined optimal conditions for production of 12-ketooleic acid are pH 8.0, 35°C, and 0.05 g/l Tween80. Under these conditions, recombinant C. glutamicum produces 3.3 mM 12-ketooleic acid, with a 72% (mol/mol) maximum conversion yield, and 1.1 g/l/h volumetric productivity in 2 h; and 3.9 mM 12- ketooleic acid, with a 74% (mol/mol) maximum conversion yield, and 0.69 g/l/h maximum volumetric productivity in 4 h of fermentation. This study constitutes the first report of significant production of 12-ketooleic acid using a recombinant Corynebacterium glutamicum-based biocatalyst.

Advanced interactive preintegrated volume rendering with a power series.

Preintegrated volume rendering produces high-quality renderings without increased sampling rates. However, a look-up table of a conventional preintegrated volume rendering requires a dimensionality of two, which disturbs interactive renderings when the transfer function is changed. Furthermore, as the resolution of the volume data set increases, the memory space required is impractical or inefficient, especially on GPUs. In the past, several approximation methods have been proposed to reduce the complexity of both the time and memory requirement, but most of them do not correctly present thin opaque structures within slabs and ignore the self-attenuation. We propose an advanced interactive preintegrated volume rendering algorithm that achieves not only high-quality renderings comparable to the conventional ones, but also $(O(n))$ time and memory space requirements even with the self-attenuation within the slabs applied. The algorithm proposed in this paper decomposes the exponential term of the ray integration equation into a power series of a finite order in the form of a linear combination to build a one-dimensional look-up table. Moreover, the proposed algorithm effectively applies the self-attenuation that is caused by fully opaque isosurfaces, by introducing an opaque prediction table. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm offers renderings visibly identical to existing preintegrated volume renderings without degrading rendering speed.