Biomedical subjects

Youngmin Kim

Publications and source records attributed to Youngmin Kim.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

A vulnerability study of the low-income elderly in the context of high temperature and mortality in Seoul, Korea.

INTRODUCTION: We investigated the impact of environmental high temperature on mortality in Seoul, Korea, and the consequences of high temperature-induced mortality with a focus on the low-income elderly. METHODS: Changes in the risk of death by age and income were estimated by a 1 degrees C increase in temperature using a generalized additive model adjusting for non-temperature related factors: time trends, seasonality, and air pollution. The study covered the years of 2000, 2001, and 2002. RESULTS: We found that income and age were potential factors in high-temperature-induced excess mortality. Evidences to support these results are as follows: first, regarding the effect of an economic factor in the association between mortality and high temperature, the study shows that the mortality rate of the low-income group is higher, by as much as 1.3- to 1.7-fold, than that of the general population. Second, taking age into consideration, the mortality of low-income elderly people is 1.5-fold higher than that of the whole low-income group. The combined effect of income and age on mortality is estimated as 2.3-fold higher than that of the general population. But the results of the low-income and elderly group were not statistically significant due to wide standard deviation. CONCLUSIONS: The relationship between high-temperature-induced excess mortality, income, and age suggests the need for a public health message, yet many results were not statistically significant: preventive and health care interventions need to be administered to the elderly and low-income group during periods of high temperature.

Adaptation, Physiological↗

PubMed2004

Defining the plant disulfide proteome.

There is considerable interest in redox regulation and new targets for thioredoxin and glutaredoxin are now being identified. It would be of great benefit to the field to have a list of all possible candidates for redox regulation--that is all disulfide proteins in plant. We developed a simple and very powerful method for identifying proteins with disulfide bonds in vivo. In this method, free thiols in proteins are fully blocked by alkylation, following which disulfide cysteines are converted to sulfhydryl groups by reduction. Finally, proteins with sulfhydryls are isolated by thiol affinity chromatography. Our method is unique in that membrane proteins as well as water-soluble proteins are examined for their disulfide nature. By applying this method to Arabidopsis thaliana we identified 65 putative disulfide proteins, including 20 that had not previously been demonstrated to be regulated by redox state. The newly identified, possibly redox-regulated proteins include: violaxanthin de-epoxidase, two oxygen-evolving enhancer proteins, carbonic anhydrase, photosystem I reaction center subunit N, photosystem I subunit III, S-adenosyl-L-methionine carboxyl methyltransferase, guanylate kinase, and bacterial mutT homolog. Possible functions of disulfide bonding in these proteins are discussed.

Arabidopsis↗

PubMed2002

Mouse DAM1 regulates pro-apoptotic activity of BLK in mammary epithelial cells.

Mouse mammary gland cDNA library was screened to search for BLK-interacting protein using yeast two-hybrid system, and a mouse DNA amplified in mammary carcinoma 1 (mDAM1) was obtained. mDAM1 cDNA contained a full coding region of 678bp encoding 225 amino acids with the predicted molecular mass of 26kDa. Comparison of the mouse to human DAM1 revealed 90 and 100% identities at the nucleotide and protein levels, respectively. A single 1.5kb transcript for mDAM1 was expressed in NMuMG mouse mammary epithelial cells. Through in vitro protein binding assay, interaction between mDAM1 and BLK was also confirmed. NMuMG cells, stably transfected and expressing mDAM1, promoted cell death under serum starvation condition. Transient coexpression of mDAM1 and BLK showed increased cell death compared to BLK expression alone in NMuMG cells. These results indicate that mDAM1 promotes mammary epithelial cell death and pro-apoptotic function of BLK.

Adaptor Proteins, Signal Transducing↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Saliency-guided enhancement for volume visualization.

Recent research in visual saliency has established a computational measure of perceptual importance. In this paper we present a visual-saliency-based operator to enhance selected regions of a volume. We show how we use such an operator on a user-specified saliency field to compute an emphasis field. We further discuss how the emphasis field can be integrated into the visualization pipeline through its modifications of regional luminance and chrominance. Finally, we validate our work using an eye-tracking-based user study and show that our new saliency enhancement operator is more effective at eliciting viewer attention than the traditional Gaussian enhancement operator.

Algorithms↗