Paenibacillus panacihumi sp. nov., a potential plant growth-promoting bacterium isolated from ginseng-cultivated soil.

A novel bacterium, designated DCY114T, was isolated from ginseng-cultivated soil in Gochang-gun, Republic of Korea. This isolate was assigned to the genus Paenibacillus and is closely related to Paenibacillus amylolyticus NRRL NRS-290T (98.3%), P. dongdonensis KUDC0114T (98.0%), P. tylopili MK2T (97.9%), P. tundrae A10bT (97.8%), and P. xylanexedens B22aT (97.5%) based on 16S rRNA gene sequence analysis. Strain DCY114T is a Gram-reaction positive, catalase and oxidase positive, facultatively aerobic rod that is motile by peritrichous flagella. Strain DCY114T produces siderophores and indole-3-acetic acid (IAA) and is able to solubilize phosphate as a plant growth-promoting bacterium. MK-7 was the diagnostic menaquinone. The major cellular fatty acids were anteiso-C15:0, C16:0, and C18:0, and the major polar lipids were diphosphatidylglycerol (DPG), phosphatidylethanolamine (PE), and an unknown amino lipid (AL1,2). The genomic DNA G + C content was 46.0 mol%. Phenotypic and chemotaxonomic results also placed strain DCY114T within the genus Paenibacillus. DNA-DNA homology values between strain DCY114T and closely related reference strains were lower than 43%. The low DNA relatedness data in combination with phylogenetic and biochemical tests indicated that strain DCY114T could not be assigned to a recognized species. The results of this study support that the DCY114T strain is a novel species belonging to the genus Paenibacillus, for which the name Paenibacillus panacihumi is proposed. The type strain is DCY114T (= KCTC 33915T = JCM 32073T).

Caspase-3/MAPK pathways as main regulators of the apoptotic effect of the phyto-mediated synthesized silver nanoparticle from dried stem of Eleutherococcus senticosus in human cancer cells.

Siberian ginseng (Eleutherococcus senticosus) was used for the synthesis of an ecofriendly silver nanoparticle (Sg-AgNP), which has exhibited antibacterial, antioxidant effect and lower cytotoxicity to normal cells in comparison to human cancer cells. Although, the potential anticancer activity of Sg-AgNP has not been determined. In this study, two cancer cell lines were used to evaluate the cytotoxicity and apoptotic effect of Sg-AgNP along with the determination of the role of the Caspase-3 / p38 MAPK pathways. Results shown that Sg-AgNP reduced the cell viability of colon cancer cells HT29 and lung cancer cells A549. The cytotoxic effect was higher than the effect exhibited by a commercial silver nanoparticle and Cisplatin. Reactive oxygen species were observed to be superior in both cell lines in the presence of Sg-AgNPs than c-AgNPs and Cisplatin. It was observed an activation of MAPK14 gene and phosphorylation of p38 MAPK protein in both cell lines induced by Sg-AgNPs treatment. Furthermore, induction of morphological changes in the nucleus was done by Sg-AgNPs at 10 µg/mL in both cell lines. On the other hands, the activation of CASP3 gene and Caspase-3 protein was observed in HT29 cells but only at protein level in A549 cells. These results, suggest that Sg-AgNPs anticancer potential activity might be linked to the induction of apoptosis though the generation of ROS by activation of the Caspase-3/p38 MAPK pathway.

Parametric study of the reflective periodic grating for in-plane displacement measurement using optical fibers.

This paper presents a technique for a simple sensing principle that can be used for the measurement of displacement. The proposed sensor head is composed of a reflective grating panel and an optical fiber as a transceiver. The simplified layout contributes to resolving the issues of space restraints during installation and complex cabling problems in transmission fiber optic sensors. In order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed technique, it is important to obtain the sinusoidal signal reflected from the grating for reasonable phase tracking. In the numerical analysis, a real wave based optical beam model is proposed for the extraction of predicted signal according to the grating width and ratio of reflection bar width to spacing. The grating pattern design to obtain a sine wave reflected sensor signal was determined within an R-square value of 0.98 after sine curve fitting analysis. Consequently, the proposed sensor principle achieved the in-plane displacement measurement with a maximum accuracy error of 5.34 µm.

Fiber optic displacement sensor with a large extendable measurement range while maintaining equally high sensitivity, linearity, and accuracy.

This paper presents a fiber optic displacement sensor composed of a transmissive grating panel, a reflection mirror, and two optical fibers as a transceiver. The proposed fiber optic displacement sensor guarantees a stable reflected signal acquisition for application in real industrial fields. Through a parametric study of the grating pitch of the transmissive grating panel, the signal-to-noise ratio, linearity, resolution, accuracy error, and sensitivity of the proposed sensor were investigated. The measured bidirectional movement demonstrated a peak to peak accuracy of 10.5 µm, high linearity of 0.9996, resolution of 3.1 µm at the full bandwidth, signal-to-noise ratio of 27.7, and high sensitivity of 31.8 µm/rad during a movement of 16,004.0 µm using the transmissive grating panel, which had a grating pitch of 200 µm. Even for an extended measurement range, the proposed scheme enables the same accuracy, linearity, and sensitivity to be maintained when compared with conventional laser displacement sensors and fiber optic displacement sensors.