THE
-
An internationally renowned academic journal published the research result produced by a KAST research team on its cover.
Fc DAAP VEGF-Trap
Photograph showing the gross features of tumor growth along the mesentery-intestinal border. T: tumor. Scale bars represent 5 mm.
Professor Gou-Young Koh of the Biological Sciences Department, KAIST, and his research team published their research result in Cancer Cell, a peer-review scientific journal, as a cover article dated August 17, 2010. It is the first time for the journal to pick up a paper written by a Korean research team and publish it as the cover.
It has been known that a vascular growth factor (VEGF) is closely related to the growth of a tumor. The research team recently discovered that in addition to VEGF, another growth factor, angiopoietin-2 (Ang2), is also engaged with the increase of tumors.
Professor Koh said, “VEGF and the angiopoietins play critical roles in tumor progression and metastasis, and a single inhibitor targeting both factors have not been available.”
The team led by Professor Koh has developed a double anti-angiogenic protein (DAAP) that can simultaneously bind VEGF-A and the angiopoietins and block their actions.
Professor Koh said in his paper, “DAAP is a highly effective molecule for regressing tumor angiogenesis and metastasis in implanted and spontaneous solid tumor; it can also effectively reduce ascites formation and vascular leakage in an ovarian carcinoma model. Thus, simultaneous blockade of VEGF-A and angiopoietins with DAAP is an effective therapeutic strategy for blocking tumor angiogenesis, metastasis, and vascular leakage.”
So far, cancer patients have received Avastin, anticancer drug, to inhibit VEGF, but the drug has not successfully restrained the growth of cancer tumors and brought to some of the patients with serious side effects instead.
Professor Koh said, “DAAP will be very effective to control the expansion of tumor growth factors, which will open up a new possibility for the development of more helpful cancer medicine with low side effects.”
2010.08.20 View 12767 -
Nature Photonics, a peer-reviewed scientific journal, released a paper written by a KAIST research team on the time-of-flight measurement.
Professor Seung-Woo Kim of the Mechanical Engineering Department, KAIST, and his research team published the result of their study on the measurement of 1 nanometer (nm) precision.
“The time-of-flight of light pulses has long been used as a direct measure of distance, but state-of-the-art measurement precision using conventional light pulses or microwaves peaks at only several hundreds of micrometers. Here, we improve the time-of-flight precision to the nanometer regime by timing femtosecond pulses through phase-locking control of the pulse repetition rate using the optical cross-correlation technique,” Professor Kim said.
According to the experiment conducted by the research team, “An Allan deviation of 117 nm in measuring a 700m distance in air at a sampling rate of 5 millisecond (ms) once the pulse repetition is phased-locked, which reduces to 7 nm as the averaging time increases to 1 second (s).”
When measuring an object located in a far distance, a laser beam is projected to the object, and the reflected light is analyzed; the light is then converted into an electric signal to calculate the distance. In so doing, Professor Kim said, the conventional method of measurement creates at least 1 mm of deviation.
He argues, “This enhanced capability is maintained at long range without periodic ambiguity, and is well suited to lidar applications. This method could also be applied to future space missions involving formation-flying satellites for synthetic aperture imaging and remote experiments related to general relativity theory."
Nature Photonics published the article online on August 8, 2010.
2010.08.18 View 12532 -
A graduating student speaks about "hope" for many disabled people who dare to have a dream of becoming a scientist.
Dong-Won Kim, a graduate student of the Mechanical Engineering Department, KAIST, will leave for the US at the end of this month to further pursue his advanced degree at University of Michigan (UM) in Ann Harbor. He has completed his master’s program at KAIST this summer, specializing in rehabilitation engineering.
Mr. Kim was born with cerebral palsy, which made him difficult to talk and use his hands. Notwithstanding the obstacles, he went through the regular school system and earned a master’s degree offered by one of the toughest universities in Korea.
When asked about what was the most difficult thing to study, he said with a gentle smile that “other than taking him a longer time to solve a math problem because of his weak hand muscle, he doesn’t have any difficulties.”
“Of course, people around me helped me a lot, but I tried to maintain my confidence in me and did my best so as not to disappoint my family and friends who have supported me,” Mr. Kim added.
Professor Pyung-Hoon Chang of the Mechanical Engineering Department, who was an adviser to Mr. Kim, recalled,
“Dong-Won has been a great student; I was quite impressed with his intellectual vigor and academic passion. He got along well with his peer students and had always positive and can-do attitude. I’m really pleased to see him graduate, given the tough situation he’s been in. He sets an inspiring role model who overcame difficulties and achieved great accomplishments.”
Mr. Kim hopes that universities including KAIST improve their educational environment to adopt friendlier policies toward the people with disabilities so that more of them can be offered an opportunity to become a scientist or engineer.
He will study medical engineering at University of Michigan—through his doctoral study, he wishes to identify causes and improvements of disabilities suffered by people and become an expert in rehabilitation.
Mr. Kim also donated 1 million won to KAIST out of his appreciation for the support he had received during his stay at the school. He said, “Although this is a small amount, I’d like to “thank you” for the members of KAIST community including its faculty and staff who have encouraged me to finish the study. If possible, I’d like to make a greater contribution in the future, and to that end, I’ll study harder and try to become the person whom I have planned for.”
Upon hearing about his generosity, President Nam Pyo Suh said, “The gift is so wonderful because it was given to us from one of our students. I wish him great success in his future study and will look forward to having his valuable contributions to our school and the nation.”
2010.08.17 View 11666 -
KAIST has developed a powerless and wireless keyboard that can be folded and easily carried around.
The KAIST Institute for Information Technology Convergence (KIITC) has developed the next generation keyboard that does not need power and wires.
The powerless/wireless keyboard developed by KIITC is flexible, foldable, portable, and compact, making the possession of keyboard easier and more convenient.
The idea of this technology was derived from "Idea Contest for Future Device" opened by KIITC in 2007, and Future Device Team (Team Leader: Dr. Sungkwan Jung) of KIITC embodied the idea and developed full-flexible powerless/wireless keyboard by using the passive Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology to support the convenient data input for daily mobile life.
Through the technology, KAIST expects to realize ubiquitous computing and communication environment, open a new market for foldable keyboards, and secure the competitiveness of mobile devices industries in the world market.
KIITC has also successfully transferred the technology of powerless/wireless keyboard to Hanyang Demitech for commercialization.
2010.08.12 View 12970 -
A graduate-level education for working professionals in science programs and exhibitions will be available from mid-August this year.
The Graduate School of Culture Technology (GSCT), KAIST, has created a new course for professionals who purse their career in science programs and exhibitions, which will start on August 19 and continue through the end of November 2010. The course will be held at Digital Media City in Seoul.
The course, also co-sponsored by National Science Museum, will offer students tuition-free opportunities to brush up their knowledge on the administration, policy, culture, technology, planning, contents development, and technology & design development, of science programs and exhibitions. Such subjects as science contents, interaction exhibitions, and utilization of new media will be studied and discussed during the course. Students will also have a class that is interactive, engaging, and visual, as well as provides hands-on learning activities.
A total of 30 candidates will be chosen for the course. Eligible applicants are graduates with a B.S. degree in the relevant filed, science program designers and exhibitors, curators for science and engineering museums, and policy planners for public and private science development programs.
2010.08.12 View 12505 -
Bioengineers develop a new strategy for accurate prediction of cellular metabolic fluxes
A team of pioneering South Korean scientists has developed a new strategy for accurately predicting cellular metabolic fluxes under various genotypic and environmental conditions. This groundbreaking research is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS) on August 2, 2010.
To understand cellular metabolism and predict its metabolic capability at systems-level, systems biological analysis by modeling and simulation of metabolic network plays an important role. The team from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), led by Distinguished Professor Sang Yup Lee, focused their research on the development of a new strategy for more accurate prediction of cellular metabolism.
“For strain improvement, biologists have made every effort to understand the global picture of biological systems and investigate the changes of all metabolic fluxes of the system under changing genotypic and environmental conditions,” said Lee. The accumulation of omics data, including genome, transcriptome, proteome, metabolome, and fluxome, provides an opportunity to understand the cellular physiology and metabolic characteristics at systems-level. With the availability of the fully annotated genome sequence, the genome-scale in silico (means “performed on computer or via computer simulation.”) metabolic models for a number of organisms have been successfully developed to improve our understanding on these biological systems. With these advances, the development of new simulation methods to analyze and integrate systematically large amounts of biological data and predict cellular metabolic capability for systems biological analysis is important.
Information used to reconstruct the genome-scale in silico cell is not yet complete, which can make the simulation results different from the physiological performances of the real cell. Thus, additional information and procedures, such as providing additional constraints (constraint: a term to exclude incorrect metabolic fluxes by restricting the solution space of in silico cell) to the model, are often incorporated to improve the accuracy of the in silico cell.
By employing information generated from the genome sequence and annotation, the KAIST team developed a new set of constraints, called Grouping Reaction (GR) constraints, to accurately predict metabolic fluxes. Based on the genomic information, functionally related reactions were organized into different groups. These groups were considered for the generation of GR constraints, as condition- and objective function- independent constraints. Since the method developed in this study does not require complex information but only the genome sequence and annotation, this strategy can be applied to any organism with a completely annotated genome sequence.
“As we become increasingly concerned with environmental problems and the limits of fossil resources, bio-based production of chemicals from renewable biomass has been receiving great attention. Systems biological analysis by modeling and simulation of biological systems, to understand cellular metabolism and identify the targets for the strain improvement, has provided a new paradigm for developing successful bioprocesses,” concluded Lee. This new strategy for predicting cellular metabolism is expected to contribute to more accurate determination of cellular metabolic characteristics, and consequently to the development of metabolic engineering strategies for the efficient production of important industrial products and identification of new drug targets in pathogens.”
2010.08.05 View 14412 -
Native-like Spider Silk Produced in Metabolically Engineered Bacterium
Microscopic picture of 285 kilodalton recombinant spider silk fiber
Researchers have long envied spiders’ ability to manufacture silk that is light-weighted while as strong and tough as steel or Kevlar. Indeed, finer than human hair, five times stronger by weight than steel, and three times tougher than the top quality man-made fiber Kevlar, spider dragline silk is an ideal material for numerous applications. Suggested industrial applications have ranged from parachute cords and protective clothing to composite materials in aircrafts. Also, many biomedical applications are envisioned due to its biocompatibility and biodegradability.
Unfortunately, natural dragline silk cannot be conveniently obtained by farming spiders because they are highly territorial and aggressive. To develop a more sustainable process, can scientists mass-produce artificial silk while maintaining the amazing properties of native silk? That is something Sang Yup Lee at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in Daejeon, the Republic of Korea, and his collaborators, Professor Young Hwan Park at Seoul National University and Professor David Kaplan at Tufts University, wanted to figure out. Their method is very similar to what spiders essentially do: first, expression of recombinant silk proteins; second, making the soluble silk proteins into water-insoluble fibers through spinning.
For the successful expression of high molecular weight spider silk protein, Professor Lee and his colleagues pieced together the silk gene from chemically synthesized oligonucleotides, and then inserted it into the expression host (in this case, an industrially safe bacterium Escherichia coli which is normally found in our gut). Initially, the bacterium refused to the challenging task of producing high molecular weight spider silk protein due to the unique characteristics of the protein, such as extremely large size, repetitive nature of the protein structure, and biased abundance of a particular amino acid glycine. “To make E. coli synthesize this ultra high molecular weight (as big as 285 kilodalton) spider silk protein having highly repetitive amino acid sequence, we helped E. coli overcome the difficulties by systems metabolic engineering,” says Sang Yup Lee, Distinguished Professor of KAIST, who led this project. His team boosted the pool of glycyl-tRNA, the major building block of spider silk protein synthesis. “We could obtain appreciable expression of the 285 kilodalton spider silk protein, which is the largest recombinant silk protein ever produced in E. coli. That was really incredible.” says Dr. Xia.
But this was only step one. The KAIST team performed high-cell-density cultures for mass production of the recombinant spider silk protein. Then, the team developed a simple, easy to scale-up purification process for the recombinant spider silk protein. The purified spider silk protein could be spun into beautiful silk fiber. To study the mechanical properties of the artificial spider silk, the researchers determined tenacity, elongation, and Young’s modulus, the three critical mechanical parameters that represent a fiber’s strength, extensibility, and stiffness. Importantly, the artificial fiber displayed the tenacity, elongation, and Young’s modulus of 508 MPa, 15%, and 21 GPa, respectively, which are comparable to those of the native spider silk.
“We have offered an overall platform for mass production of native-like spider dragline silk. This platform would enable us to have broader industrial and biomedical applications for spider silk. Moreover, many other silk-like biomaterials such as elastin, collagen, byssus, resilin, and other repetitive proteins have similar features to spider silk protein. Thus, our platform should also be useful for their efficient bio-based production and applications,” concludes Professor Lee.
This work is published on July 26 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) online.
2010.07.28 View 18787 -
The thermal fluctuation and elasticity of cell membranes, lipid vesicles, interacting with pore-forming peptides were reported by a research team at KAIST.
A research team from KAIST, consisted of Sung-Min Choi, Professor of Nuclear and Quantum Engineering Department, and Ji-Hwan Lee, a doctoral student in the Department, published a paper on the “thermal fluctuation and elasticity of lipid vesicles interacting with pore-forming peptides.” The paper was carried by Physical Review Letters, an internationally renowned peer-review journal on physics on July 16, 2010.
Cell membranes, which consist of lipid bilayers, play important roles in cells as barriers to maintain concentrations and matrices to host membrane proteins. During cellular processes such as cell fission and fusion, the cell membranes undergo various morphological changes governed by the interplay between protein and lipid membranes. There have been many theoretical and experimental approaches to understand cellular processes driven by protein-lipid membrane interactions. However, it is not fully established how the membrane elastic properties, which play an important role in membrane deformation, are affected by the protein-membrane interactions.
Antimicrobial peptides are one of the most common examples of proteins that modify membrane morphology. While the pore-forming mechanisms of antimicrobial peptides in lipid bilayers have been widely investigated, there have been only a few attempts to understand the mechanisms in terms of membrane elastic properties. In particular, the effects of pore formation on the membrane fluctuation and elastic properties, which provide key information to understand the mechanism of antimicrobial peptide activity, have not been reported yet. The research team reports the thermal fluctuation and elasticity of lipid vesicles interacting with pore-forming peptides, which were measured by neutron spin-echo spectroscopy.
The results of this study are expected to pay an important role in understanding the elastic behavior and morphological changes of cell membranes induced by protein-membrane interactions, and may provide new insights for developing new theoretical models for membrane fluctuations which include the membrane mediated interaction between protein patches.
(a) (b)
Figure
(a) Schematics for bound melittin and pores in lipid bilayers
(b) P NMR signal ratio (with/without Mn2+) of DOPC LUV-melittin vs P/L at 30˚C. The dashed line is a guide for eyes.
2010.07.23 View 12763 -
International Center was built to promote greater exchanges and collaborations between the international community and KAIST.
On July 9, 2010, KAIST held an opening ceremony for the construction of International Center. The Center will serve as an internal and external liaison for the university, providing a source of assistance to faculty, administrators, and students on matters related to international activities and initiatives. It will also pursue greater exchanges and collaborations between the international community and KAIST.
The facility accommodates various meetings, exhibitions, library, language services, and other amenities. The International Cooperation Team of KAIST will be moved into this building and provide a variety of services, such as immigration regulations, cultural adjustment, employment, to assist international students, scholars, faculty, and staff at KAIST, as well as Korean students seeking opportunities to study, work, or travel abroad. An international nursery school will also be inside the building so that foreign faculty and students with children can have convenience and quality child care while they are teaching or studying.
At the center will be held many different kinds of international event—one among them is KAIST-ONE, a festival held twice a year in spring and fall to introduce and share culture, education, and food of the global community at KAIST.
2010.07.19 View 12083 -
The incumbent head of KAIST has been reelected for the second term in office.
President Nam Pyo Suh, whose first term in office is nearing in early July, has succeeded to secure his position for the second term.
The KAIST Board of Trustees held a meeting on July 2, 2010 at Westin Chosun Hotel in Seoul and selected the incumbent president to work continually for the next four years. Upon approval from the Mister of Education, Science and Technology, his second term will begin on July 14, 2010 as the 14th President of KAIST.
2010.07.07 View 10293 -
A senior couple donated their fortune to KAIST, hoping their contribution to be used for the development of science and technology in Korea.
A couple living in Kyunggi Province, Chun-Sik Cho (86) and Chang-Gi Yoon (82), donated to KAIST a 10 billion won worth of real estate. The couple thought about giving away their fortune since retirement and finally made up their mind after becoming to know about their neighbor’s good deeds.
The neighbor, Byung-Ho Kim, gave KAIST a 30 billion won worth of real estate last year. Influenced by Mr. Kim’s donation and their long-cherished wish to help others in need, the couple decided to transfer the ownership of their land to KAIST. They hoped that their contribution to be used for the development of science and technology in Korea.
The couple, who survived through the Korean civil war in the early 1950s, recalled their old days,
“We made through a harsh and difficult life right after the war. Everyone was poor and had nothing to wear or eat. We literally had to eat all sorts of grasses that were green on the ground. All of us had to work really hard to get out of despair resulted from the colonization of our nation by Japan and the subsequent civil war.”
Mr. Cho added, “The development of science and technology in our nation really propelled the overall advancement of our society and helped to make today’s success that is enjoyed by the current generation of our nation. It is our greatest hope that our contribution will add a small help in our nation’s efforts to further advance the development of science and technology. I would like KAIST to do just that with our donation.”
KAIST announced a plan to use their contribution for the establishment of a new graduate school specialized in green transportation and the development of related technology, called Green Transportation Graduate School. The university will name the new graduate school after the couple’s name in recognition of their goodwill.
The Green Transportation Graduate School will host academic programs and conduct researches related to the future transportation that is based on a renewable energy source and provides answers to the current energy problems faced by mankind. Multidisciplinary and convergent studies will be implemented through collaborations between academia, governments, and industries.
In the past four years, KAIST has witnessed a dramatic increase in the number and amount of donations received from all corners of Korean society and from around the world since President Nam Pyo Suh took the university’s top administrative office in 2006—1,004 in 2006; 2,158 in 2007; 3,091 in 2008; and 3,324 in 2009.
Major contributions since 2006
30 billion Won by Moon-Sul Chung in July 2001
10 million USD by Byiung-Joon Park in September 2007
2.5 million USD by Neil Pappalardo in November 2007
57.8 billion Won by Geun-Chul Ryu in August 2008
30 billion Won by Byung-Ho Kim in August 2009
2010.07.07 View 12481 -
A new facility at KAIST opened on July 6, 2010.
Ryu Geun-Chul Sports Complelx will allow students, faculty and staff to pause a moment and exhale in the hustle and bustle of their daily lives.
An opening ceremony celebrating the completion of a new facility for the KAIST family was held on July 6, 2010 at the campus. Had it not been for contributions of many people and organizations throughout the nation, among others, Dr. Geun-Chul Ryu, POSCO, Woori Bank, members of KAIST community, parents, and other citizens, it would be impossible to build the facility, said the university.
The Complex, a three-story building with a basement, has an indoor court for basketball and volleyball with 3,000 individual seats, 200 meters of running track, indoor golf range, a fitness center, and other convenient facilities.
Any members of KAIST community can visit the building and relax their body and mind stressed with work and study. It also provides a large space for ceremonial and cultural gatherings such as 2010 KAIST commencement ceremony.
The official name of the building is “Ryu Geun-Chul Sports Complelx,” which was created in appreciation of Dr. Geun-Chul Ryu’s generous act who had donated 57.8 billion won worth of real estate to KAIST in August 2008.
2010.07.07 View 13366