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Injectable dermal fillers, which are used for various plastic surgery purposes, are experiencing explosive growth in the market due to increasing interest in appearance management. Hyaluronic acid (HA) hydrogels have been considered an ideal material for fillers due to their high-water retention, biodegradability, and biocompatibility. However, their application is limited by shortcomings in durability and persistence caused by rapid enzymatic degradation. Therefore, in this study, we introduce acetylated hyaluronic acid-divinyl sulfone (AcHA-DVS) hydrogels for novel approach to improving the physical properties and gel retention time of HA. The AcHA-DVS hydrogels showed significant advantages in terms of longevity and performance as dermal fillers compared to HA-DVS hydrogels. These results suggest that our new AcHA-DVS hydrogel is a promising biomaterial for use as an injectable filler or scaffold of tissue engineering.

Three-dimensional (3D) culture systems that provide a more physiologically similar environment than conventional two-dimensional (2D) cultures have been extensively developed. Previously we have provided a facile method for the formation of 3D spheroids using non-adhesive N-hexanoyl glycol chitosan (HGC) hydrogel-coated dishes, but with limitations such as low gel stability and weak mechanical properties. In this study, chemically crosslinked hydrogels were prepared by photocrosslinking of methacrylated HGCs (M-HGCs), and their spheroid-forming abilities were evaluated for long-term 3D cell cultures. The M-HGC hydrogels demonstrated not only enhanced gel stability, but also good spheroid-forming abilities. Furthermore, the M-HGC-coated dishes were effective in generating spheroids of larger size and higher cell density depending on the crosslinking density of the M-HGCs. These results indicate that our hydrogel-coated dish system could be widely applied as an effective technique to produce cell spheroids with customized sizes and densities that are essential for tissue engineering and drug screening.

Dopamine-modified hyaluronic acid (DA-HA) has been initially developed as an efficient coating and adhesion material for industrial uses. However, the biological activity and safety of DA-HA in the brain have not been explored yet. Here, we report a series of evidence that DA-HA exhibits similar functionality as dopamine (DA), but with much lower toxicity arising from autoxidation. DA-HA shows very little autoxidation even after 48-hour incubation. This is profoundly different from DA and its derivatives including L-DOPA, which all induce severe neuronal death after pre-autoxidation, indicating that autoxidation is the cause of neuronal death. Furthermore, in vivo injection of DA-HA induces significantly lower toxicity compared to 6-OHDA, a well-known oxidized and toxic form of DA, and alleviates the apomorphine-induced rotational behavior in the 6-OHDA animal model of Parkinson’s disease. Our study proposes that DA-HA with DA-like functionalities and minimal toxicity can be an effective therapeutic substitute for L-DOPA in Parkinson’s disease.

The current 2D culture model systems developed for drug screening are not sufficient to reflect the characteristics of in vivo solid tumors. Therefore, more effective in vitro tumor model systems must be developed for translational studies on therapeutic drug screening and testing. Herein, we report a new ultra-low adhesion (ULA) hydrogel for generating 3D cancer cell spheroids as tumor models in vitro. N-octanoyl glycol chitosan (OGC) was synthesized and coated onto the surface of a typical cell culture dish. Cell spheroids were effectively formed on the OGC-coated surface, and phenotypes of the tumor cells were well maintained during culture. More importantly, U373-MG cells cultured on OGC-coated plates were more resistant to doxorubicin than cells cultured on typical plates. Our OGC-based ULA system may offer a convenient method for 3D cell culture to provide enhanced performance in cancer research, drug screening and toxicology.

When data is loaded from a key-value store to the GPU in a conventional GPU-driven computing model, it entails the overhead of all the heavy I/O stacks of the key-value store and file system. This paper presents GPUKV, a GPU-driven computing framework that eliminates the aforementioned overhead with less host-side usage of resources such as CPU and memory. GPUKV has the following three features: (i) GPUKV provides a key-value store abstraction to the GPU; (ii) In GPUKV, when loading data from the key-value store to the GPU, it is performed through PCIe peer-to-peer (P2P) communication without copying to the user and kernel space memory; and (iii) GPUKV uses KVSSD, which implements a key-value store inside an SSD, completely eliminating the interaction with the key-value store and file system for P2P communication. We have developed GPUKV with a KVSSD implemented on the Cosmos+ OpenSSD platform in a Linux environment. Our extensive evaluations demonstrate that GPUKV improves execution time by up to 18.7 times and reduces host CPU cycle usage by up to 175 times compared to conventional CPU-based GPU computing models.

Background Mucoadhesive polymers, which may increase the contact time between the polymer and the tissue, have been widely investigated for pharmaceutical formulations. In this study, we developed a new polysaccharide-based mucoadhesive polymer with thermogelling properties. Methods Hexanoyl glycol chitosan (HGC), a new thermogelling polymer, was synthesized by the chemical modification of glycol chitosan using hexanoic anhydride. The HGC was further modified to include thiol groups to improve the mucoadhesive property of thermogelling HGC. The degree of thiolation of the thiolated HGCs (SH-HGCs) was controlled in the range of 5–10% by adjusting the feed molar ratio. The structure of the chemically modified polymers was characterized by 1H NMR and ATR-FTIR. The sol-gel transition, mucoadhesiveness, and biocompatibility of the polymers were determined by a tube inverting method, rheological measurements, and in vitro cytotoxicity tests, respectively. Results The aqueous solution (4 wt%) of HGC with approximately 33% substitution showed a sol-gel transition temperature of approximately 41 °C. SH-HGCs demonstrated lower sol-gel transition temperatures (34 ± 1 and 31 ± 1 °С) compared to that of HGC due to the introduction of thiol groups. Rheological studies of aqueous mixture solutions of SH-HGCs and mucin showed that SH-HGCs had stronger mucoadhesiveness than HGC due to the interaction between the thiol groups of SH-HGCs and mucin. Additionally, we confirmed that the thermogelling properties might improve the mucoadhesive force of polymers. Several in vitro cytotoxicity tests showed that SH-HGCs showed little toxicity at concentrations of 0.1–1.0 wt%, indicating good biocompatibility of the polymers. Conclusions The resultant thiolated hexanoyl glycol chitosans may play a crucial role in mucoadhesive applications in biomedical areas.

For the first time, 4Gbit density STT-MRAM using perpendicular MTJ in compact cell was successfully demonstrated through the tight distributions for resistance and magnetic properties. This paper includes the results regarding parasitic resistance control process, MTJ process, and MTJ stack engineering. Both of successful 4Gb read and write operations were performed with high TMR, low Ic. This result will brighten the prospect of high-density STT-MRAM.

In Vision-based Intelligent Transportation System(ITS) the segmentation of road region is a very basic functionality. Accordingly, in this paper, we propose a region segmentation method using adaptive pattern extraction technique to segment road regions and sky regions from original images. The proposed method consists of three steps; firstly we perform the initial segmentation using Mean Shift algorithm, the second step is the candidate region selection based on a static-pattern matching technique and the third is the region growing step based on a dynamic-pattern matching technique. The proposed method is able to get more reliable results than the classic region segmentation methods which are based on existing split and merge strategy. The reason for the better results is because we use adaptive patterns extracted from neighboring regions of the current segmented regions to measure the region homogeneity. To evaluate advantages of the proposed method, we compared our method with the classical pattern matching method using static-patterns. In the experiments, the proposed method was proved that the better performance of 8.12% was achieved when we used adaptive patterns instead of static-patterns. We expect that the proposed method can segment road and sky areas in the various road condition in stable, and take an important role in the vision-based ITS applications.

Sweet potato powders made from eight Korean varieties, including purple-fleshed, orange-fleshed, and commercial dry type sweet potatoes, were investigated for physicochemical and pasting properties to develop processed food. Crude protein and lipid contents of Shinjami and Borami were higher than those of other varieties. The lightness value of raw sweet potato flesh was the highest value in Shinchunmi, and the lowest in Shinjami. Using the color difference ( ΔE), color similarities compared to the white plate occurred in the following order; purple-fleshed > orange-fleshed > commercial dry type sweet potatoes. Total and damaged starch contents were significantly different (p

This paper describes fabrication of a poly(dimethyl siloxane) (PDMS)-based chip to analyze multiple protein interactions utilizing glycidyl methacrylate (GMA) photopolymer for a site-specific immobilization of capture proteins in a closed system. First, using one direction channels of a PDMS mold having cross-channels, GMA micropads were prepared by photopolymerizing GMA solution by 365 nm light irradiation at predetermined positions. After the first mold was replaced with a second mold having higher height or directly without mold changing, capture proteins were allowed to be covalently immobilized onto the surface of the epoxide-activated GMA pads. Following immobilization, poly(ethylene glycol) diacrylate (PEG-DA) precursor was photopolymerized at specific regions to generate plugs for prevention of mixing between different sample injection channels, diminishing the need of a mold changing for sample injections. Final chip was assembled by connecting separated sample injection channels using a connector mold. The viability of this strategy was successfully demonstrated by simultaneous detection of two different antigen–antibody interactions.

We report the dependence of Si–SiO2 interface trap density after Fowler–Nordheim (F/N) stress on various capping materials between gate stacks and an inter layer dielectric (ILD) in a NAND Flash memory cell. The interface trap density was characterized by charge pumping method (CPM). When the capping layer is an oxide, the Nit after F/N stress is approximately 2×1011 cm-2, which is about 50% smaller than that with a nitride layer. We found that the oxide layer causes compressive stress whereas the nitride layer causes a relatively high tensile stress in the underlying substrate by measuring the warp change of the substrate. To correlate the interface state density and data retention characteristics, we measured Vt shift after high-temperature baking. When an oxide capping layer is used, the retention characteristics of memory devices are greatly improved compared to the nitride capping case. These results show a good correlation between the interface characteristics and mechanical stress behaviors.

DNA microarrays are powerful tools for the high throughput analysis of nucleic acids due to their parallel detection capabilities. To realize the apparent power of DNA microarray, an efficient assay format is essential and a variety of assay formats have been developed for nucleic acid detection on microarrays. Many of them employ fluorescence-based methods because fluorescence detection is straightforward and easy to implement. Herein we broadly review fluorescence-based assay formats with a focus on PCR-associated target preparation. For the heterogeneous assay of nucleic acid on DNA microarrays, sensitivity is one of the most important factors and special emphasis has been given to recently developed signal amplification strategies aimed at achieving high sensitivity.

A middle-1x nm design rule multi-level NAND flash memory cell (M1X-NAND) has been successfully developed for the first time. 1) QSPT (Quad Spacer Patterning Technology) of ArF immersion lithography is used for patterning mid-1x nm rule wordline (WL). In order to achieve high performance and reliability, several integration technologies are adopted, such as 2) advanced WL air-gap process, 3) floating gate slimming process, and 4) optimized junction formation scheme. And also, by using 5) new N±1 WL Vpass scheme during programming, charge loss and program speed are greatly improved. As a result, mid-1x nm design rule NAND flash memories has been successfully realized.

In this study, we used localized surface plasmon resonances (LSPR) to observe a phenomenon of binding of DNA on Au and Au/Ag nanostructure arrays. Au and Au/Ag nanostructures of various geometric sizes and metal compositions were fabricated by colloidal lithography technique. The immobilization of capture DNA and subsequent hybridization with target DNA on the nanostructures caused the shift of maximum peak in LSPR spectra of the nanostructures. Using the peak shift, the immobilization of capture DNA was clearly verified in a nondestructive manner and hybridization with complementary target DNA was reliably differentiated from the non-specific binding with noncomplementary DNA. This work firmly implies that the LSPR spectra of the nanostructrues can be efficiently utilized to achieve a novel strategy for the detection of DNA on the nanostructures.

MT reliability of MANOS cell was examined from cell array. Lots of retention tail bits occurred even at RT. The fail cells were classified as the manner of q-loss. Defective cell lost abundant charge at early stage, while the q-loss rate of worse cell was faster and lasted in a certain period. Si-cluster in our nitride was supposed to make the worse cell, and this cell redeemed its retention capability by reducing shallow trap in Si-rich nitride.

In this study, physical properties of different trapping nitrides were extracted, and the program efficiency of MANOS cell was explained. We also showed shallow traps were generated at trapping nitride by etching damage, and this could be cured resulting great improvement of cell performance. Lastly, erasure mechanism of TiN-gate MANOS cell was discussed with some experimental and modeling results.

A sense amplifier detects a small signal and amplifies it to produce a large signal. However, a sensing failure may occur owing to the offset voltage caused by the mismatch of paired transistors in the sense amplifier. Since the yield of a sense amplifier is the strong function of the offset voltage, estimation of the offset voltage and its statistical distribution is critical in designing sense amplifiers. As offset voltage can be assumed to follow a Gaussian distribution, its standard deviation (1-sigma, σOS) can be estimated from a simple variance model for paired transistors. However, owing to secondary effects such as differential charge injection, drain-induced barrier lowering and stack effect, σOS estimated using the variance model deviates from that obtained from statistical (Monte-Carlo) simulation, and the deviation becomes larger as technology scales down. This study analyses secondary effects on the offset voltage in the most commonly used latch-type sense amplifiers and suggests novel σOS estimation model. The proposed model, which considers secondary effects, can accurately estimate σOS even when technology scales down. This study also presents the trend of the influence of secondary effects on the offset voltage with technology scaling.