Identity and Trauma in Minjin Lee’s Pachinko

( Bingjie Liu ),( Bok-ki Lee ) 21세기영어영문학회 2023 영어영문학21 Vol.36 No.4

Minjin Lee’s Pachinko unravels the characters’ life trajectories, mirroring the evolution, impact, dissemination, healing, and reconciliation of a national trauma. This paper meticulously explores the origins and development of Noa’s second-generation trauma, meticulously tracing the journey that led to his eventual collapse and tragic suicide. Noa confronted both an anxiety crisis and a mourning crisis, plunging him into the abyss of an identity crisis. Concurrently, his adoption of Japanese mannerisms embodies a hybrid strategy, actively dismantling the theoretical foundations of discrimination against Zainichi Koreans in Japanese society. This process of deconstruction serves as a pivotal catalyst in the ultimate reconciliation of the national trauma

Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma in The Sound of One Hand Clapping

( Bingjie Liu ),( Bok-ki Lee ) 대한영어영문학회 2023 영어영문학연구 Vol.49 No.2

Trauma is widely believed to be intergenerational, while Van Alphen believes that trauma is essentially different between survivors of traumatic events and their children. The second generation of trauma groups has been surrounded by traumatic culture since they entered the world, so they have lost the possibility of understanding and reconciling with traumatic events. That is why the second generation suffers more. In order to recover from the trauma, they need to restore their identity to their parents. Taking the novel The Sound of One Hand Clapping as an example, this paper makes a case study to follow the process of Sonja, representative of the second generation. Sonja has been fragmented by trauma and finally reconciles with her parents. I will argue from Sonja’s case that the hidden history must be re-exposed and fully understood to repair the wound, which is necessary and achievable. (Chonbuk National University)

Modified Chitosan Membrane for Adsorption of GABA

( Bingjie Wang ),( Ik-joong Kang ) 한국키틴키토산학회 2018 한국키틴키토산학회지 Vol.23 No.1

Gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), the natural non-protein amino acid, is the chief inhibitory neurotransmitter in the mammalian central nervous system. It plays the principal role in reducing neuronal excitability throughout the nervous system. In humans, GABA is also directly responsible for the regulation of muscle tone and improves cerebral blood flow and promoted the metabolism of brain cells. The drug delivery system is an efficiency way to delivery drug to the desired part of body in vivo movement, which can support its safety and control the dosage form. Nowadays, to make drug delivery through the mucosa is wildly studied, which would be regarded to have broad prospects. The chitosan can be prepared from natural biopolymer chitin and cast into membranes, whose sizes and shapes can be designed arbitrarily. It has been found that chitosan membrane stimulates the migration of inflammatory cells and promotes cellular organization. Modified chitosan membrane by glutaraldehyde can be changed the function group from amino group into aldehyde group. The oxidization changed the aldehyde group into carboxyl group, which finally can be used to absorb GABA which has the amino group. The different thickness and different modifying conditions of membrane were studied from the absorption test. The ninhydrin test was used to detect the GABA’s concentration which can monitor the absorption situation from the membrane. Finally, the optimum modifying condition was obtained and the tendency of absorption in different conditions A = A₀ -A_r = Kb(C₀ -C_r) was obtained.

A Novel Method to Improve the Dispersibility of Silicon Nitride Powders in Aqueous Media

Bingjie Xu,Mengxing Li,Qi Chen,Pengfei Liu,Baosong Xu,Ben Qiu,Liang Xu,Zhao Han 성균관대학교(자연과학캠퍼스) 성균나노과학기술원 2019 NANO Vol.14 No.9

The present study describes a novel method to improve the dispersibility of silicon nitride powders in aqueous media. Specifically, a new Si3N4@g-C3N4 core–shell composite material was synthesized via annealing the mixture of silicon nitride and melamine under a nitrogen atmosphere using heating method. The effects of various initial mass ratios of Si3N4 and melamine on the structure and dispersibility of the composite were systematically investigated. The results of X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and transmission electron microscope demonstrated that as-obtained Si3N4@g-C3N4 composite powders possess the core–shell structure, whereas the zeta potential and sedimentation analysis showed that they exhibit good dispersion in aqueous media. Furthermore, the colloidal dispersion of the composite powders is most stable when the initial mass ratio of Si3N4 and melamine is 100 : 3. The coated g-C3N4 could be completely removed in a cryogenic nitrogen atmosphere. The proposed process is expected to provide novel avenues for the study of dispersion of other inorganic powders.

Comparison of Radiological Tumor Response Based on iRECIST and RECIST 1.1 in Metastatic Clear-Cell Renal Cell Carcinoma Patients Treated with Programmed Cell Death-1 Inhibitor Therapy

Zheng Bingjie,Shin Ji Hoon,Li Hailiang,Chen Yanqiong,Guo Yuan,Wang Meiyun 대한영상의학회 2021 Korean Journal of Radiology Vol.22 No.3

Objective: To evaluate the radiological tumor response patterns and compare the response assessments based on immunebased therapeutics Response Evaluation Criteria in Solid Tumors (iRECIST) and RECIST 1.1 in metastatic clear-cell renal cell carcinoma (mccRCC) patients treated with programmed cell death-1 (PD-1) inhibitors. Materials and Methods: All mccRCC patients treated with PD-1 inhibitors at Henan Cancer Hospital, China, between January 2018 and April 2019, were retrospectively studied. A total of 30 mccRCC patients (20 males and 10 females; mean age, 55.6 years; age range, 37–79 years) were analyzed. The target lesions were quantified on consecutive CT scans during therapy using iRECIST and RECIST 1.1. The tumor growth rate was calculated before and after therapy initiation. The response patterns were analyzed, and the differences in tumor response assessments of the two criteria were compared. The intra- and inter-observer variabilities of iRECIST and RECIST 1.1 were also analyzed. Results: The objective response rate throughout therapy was 50% (95% confidence interval [CI]: 32.1–67.9) based on iRECIST and 30% (95% CI: 13.6–46.4) based on RECIST 1.1. The time-to-progression (TTP) based on iRECIST was longer than that based on RECIST 1.1 (median TTP: not reached vs. 170 days, p = 0.04). iRECIST and RECIST 1.1 were discordant in 8 cases, which were evaluated as immune-unconfirmed PD based on iRECIST and PD based on RECIST 1.1. Six patients (20%, 6/30) had pseudoprogression based on iRECIST, of which four demonstrated early pseudoprogression and two had delayed pseudoprogression. Significant differences in the tumor response assessments based on the two criteria were observed (p < 0.001). No patients demonstrated hyperprogression during the study period. Conclusion: Our study confirmed that the iRECIST criteria are more capable of capturing immune-related atypical responses during immunotherapy, whereas conventional RECIST 1.1 may underestimate the benefit of PD-1 inhibitors. Pseudoprogression is not rare in mccRCC patients during PD-1 inhibitor therapy, and it may last for more than the recommended maximum of 8 weeks, indicating a limitation of the current strategy for immune response monitoring.

PL-PatchSurfer: A Novel Molecular Local Surface-Based Method for Exploring Protein-Ligand Interactions

Hu, Bingjie,Zhu, Xiaolei,Monroe, Lyman,Bures, Mark G.,Kihara, Daisuke MDPI 2014 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MOLECULAR SCIENCES Vol.15 No.9

<P>Structure-based computational methods have been widely used in exploring protein-ligand interactions, including predicting the binding ligands of a given protein based on their structural complementarity. Compared to other protein and ligand representations, the advantages of a surface representation include reduced sensitivity to subtle changes in the pocket and ligand conformation and fast search speed. Here we developed a novel method named PL-PatchSurfer (Protein-Ligand PatchSurfer). PL-PatchSurfer represents the protein binding pocket and the ligand molecular surface as a combination of segmented surface patches. Each patch is characterized by its geometrical shape and the electrostatic potential, which are represented using the 3D Zernike descriptor (3DZD). We first tested PL-PatchSurfer on binding ligand prediction and found it outperformed the pocket-similarity based ligand prediction program. We then optimized the search algorithm of PL-PatchSurfer using the PDBbind dataset. Finally, we explored the utility of applying PL-PatchSurfer to a larger and more diverse dataset and showed that PL-PatchSurfer was able to provide a high early enrichment for most of the targets. To the best of our knowledge, PL-PatchSurfer is the first surface patch-based method that treats ligand complementarity at protein binding sites. We believe that using a surface patch approach to better understand protein-ligand interactions has the potential to significantly enhance the design of new ligands for a wide array of drug-targets.</P>

An indoor fusion positioning algorithm of Bluetooth and PDR based on particle filter with dynamic adjustment of weights calculation strategy

( Lingwu Qian ),( Bingjie Yuan ) 한국인터넷정보학회 2021 KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Syst Vol.15 No.10

The low cost of Bluetooth technology has led to its wide usage in indoor positioning. However, some inherent shortcomings of Bluetooth technology have limited its further development in indoor positioning, such as the unstable positioning state caused by the fluctuation of Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) and the low transmission frequency accompanied by a poor real-time performance in positioning and tracking moving targets. To address these problems, an indoor fusion positioning algorithm of Bluetooth technology and pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) based on a particle filter with dynamic adjustment of weights calculation strategy (BPDW) will be proposed. First, an orderly statistical filter (OSF) sorts the RSSI values of a period and then eliminates outliers to obtain relatively stable RSSI values. Next, the Group-based Trilateration algorithm (GTP) enhances positioning accuracy. Finally, the particle filter algorithm with dynamic adjustment of weight calculation strategy fuses the results of Bluetooth positing and PDR to improve the performance of positioning moving targets. To evaluate the performance of BPDW, we compared BPDW with other representative indoor positioning algorithms, including fingerprint positioning, trilateral positioning (TP), multilateral positioning (MP), Kalman filter, and strong tracking filter. The results showed that BPDW has the best positioning performance on static and moving targets in simulation and actual scenes.

Involvement of Nuclear Related Factor 2 Signaling Pathway in the Brain of Obese Rats and Obesity-Resistant Rats Induced by High-Fat Diet

Weiwei Ma,Bingjie Ding,Li-Jing Wang,Yi Shao,Rong Xiao 한국식품영양과학회 2016 Journal of medicinal food Vol.19 No.4

We aimed to investigate the mechanism of brain damage in diet-induced obese (DIO) rats and diet-resistant (DR) rats from the viewpoint of redox state and nuclear related factor 2 (Nrf2) signaling pathway. Sprague-Dawley rats were fed with a high-fat diet for 10 weeks to obtain the DIO and DR rats. d-Galactose was injected subcutaneously through the back of the neck for 10 weeks to establish oxidative stress model rats. Then, the ratio of reduced glutathione (GSH)/oxidized glutathione (GSSG) and the level of glutathione peroxidase (GSH-Px) in serum and brain tissue were measured by using enzymatic assay kits. The levels of cholecystokinin and peptide YY in the brain tissue were detected by using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay kits. In addition, the protein expression of Nrf2 and its downstream factors such as heme oxygenase 1, manganese superoxide dismutase, and NAD(P)H quinone oxidoreductase 1 (NQO1) in the brain tissue were measured by Western blotting. In the brain of DIO rats, the level of GSH and ratio of GSH/GSSG were lower, whereas the GSH-Px concentration was higher compared with DR rats significantly. On the other hand, the GSSG level was higher in the serum of DIO rats compared with the DR rats. The oxidative stress state in the brain of DIO rats, but not in DR rats, were observed. In addition, the protein expressions of Nrf2 and NQO1 were downregulated in the brain of DR rats compared with that in DIO rats. Our data suggest that the Nrf2/NQO1 signaling pathway and redox state were involved in the pathogenesis of the rats prone to obesity, but not the DR rats resistant to obesity.

A Comparison of Smart Shading Control Strategies for Better Building Energy Performance

Jian Yao,Bingjie Wang,RongYue Zheng 보안공학연구지원센터 2016 International Journal of Smart Home Vol.10 No.12

The objective of this research is to investigate the energy performance of different smart solar shading control strategies on typical residential buildings in hot summer and cold winter zone of China. Four typical sensor based automatic shading control strategies were analyzed using building simulation tools to optimize indoor thermal and energy performance. It was found that solar radiation based sensor control has a better energy performance than temperature based sensor control with an energy reduction (both cooling and heating) of about 5-10% depending on the type of control strategy. The results indicate that solar based sensor control on solar shades can be widely used in residential and commercial buildings for an improved energy performance.

Genistein Alleviates β-Amyloid-Induced Inflammatory Damage Through Regulating Toll-Like Receptor 4/Nuclear Factor κB

Weiwei Ma,Bingjie Ding,Huanling Yu,Linhong Yuan,Yuandi Xi,Rong Xiao 한국식품영양과학회 2015 Journal of medicinal food Vol.18 No.3

Genistein (GEN), a major soybean isoflavone (SIF), might possess neuroprotective properties through its antiinflammatory activity. We hypothesized that GEN could prevent the inflammatory damage detected in C6 cells induced by β-amyloid peptides 25-35 (Aβ25-35). Accordingly, we evaluated the inflammatory damage induced by Aβ25-35 and the protective effect of GEN against Aβ25-35 in C6 cells. In our study, the C6 glial cells (rats glioma cell lines) were preincubated with or without GEN for 2 h following incubation with Aβ25-35 for another 24 h. Then, methylthiazolyl tetrazolium (MTT) assay was used to assess the cell viability. Immunofluorescence staining was used to identify the C6 cells. Inflammatory factors tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-α and interleukin (IL)-1β were analyzed by using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). Western blot analysis and reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction analysis were performed to assess the expression of Toll-like receptors 4 (TLR4), inhibitor of kappaB-alpha (IκB-α). The current results showed that GEN could alleviate Aβ25-35-induced cell apoptosis and prevent Aβ25-35-induced TNF-α and IL-1β release from C6 cells. In addition, GEN prevented Aβ25-35-induced upregulation of the gene and protein expression of TLR4, and GEN significantly upregulated the expression of IκB-α in C6 cells damaged by Aβ25-35. These results suggest that GEN can alleviate the inflammatory stress caused by Aβ25-35 treatment, which might be associated with the neuroprotective effect of GEN regulating the TLR4/NFκB signaling pathway.