It is a national honor for scientists to write an article featured by illustrious scientific journals.
In this sense, Korea swam in a sea of honors last week as four papers gave such recognition.
On Sept. 18, Nature Neuroscience, a sister journal of Nature, covered a protein found by Prof. Kim Eun-joon at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST).
Two days later, the international journal Proteomics put another feat of Korean researchers at the Korea Basic Science Institute, on the cover of its September issue.
Headed by senior researcher Park Young-mok, the state-backed institute found a record of 1,533 types of brain protein, a discovery that can one day help treat various neural diseases.
On Thursday (Sept. 21), a team spearheaded by Prof. Hwang In-hwan at the Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTEC) unveiled an article on plants that can tolerate extremely bad conditions.
The achievements were ed in the U.S.-based illustrious biology journal Cell.
Prof. Chang Sung-how at the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST) wrapped up the four-papers-in-five-days saga together with Embo Journal.
The affiliate of the Britain-based Nature featured Changs article at its website (www.emboj.org) last Friday on a protein closely related to brain diseases as well as learning and memory.
Maybe this is the first time that four notable biology papers were honored by well-renowned journals in a week, a Seoul professor said. This shows Koreas edge in the potential-laden segment.
KAIST Prof. Kim and GIST Prof. Chang both dealt with synapses, which are significant in understanding s and dyss of the human brain.
Kims team learned a protein, dubbed NGL, is involved in synapse generation while Chang identified another protein, called SPIN90, underlying learning and memory.
Through over-expression experiments with neurons of cultured rats, we recognized that NGL regulates the ation of excitatory synapses, Kim said.
These findings are expected to help understand and heal such brain disorders as schizophrenia, mental retardation and autism, the 42-year-old said.
In the meantime, Prof. Chang noted his works with SPIN90 protein delve into the secrets of how human beings can learn and remember.
SPIN90 takes charge of regulating dendritic spines, which are closely related with learning ability and memory. Rats deprived of SPIN90 showed decreased spine density, Chang said.
Dendritic spines are also the sites where synapses take place. In the sense, SPIN90 has something to do with synapses, the 38- year-old scientist said.
All-important synapses
Chang said Kims works are about generating synapses while his are about keeping them active, and the separate experiments will be converged any time to create synergy.
Synapses are a Holy Grail for neurologists and breakthroughs by Korean researchers would be beneficial to one another, Chang said.
Synapses are the sites where synaptic transmission occurs, thus allowing brisk communications between different neurons in the nerve fiber.
Synapses allow the neurons of the central nervous system to interconnected neural circuits.
They are crucial to the biological computations that engineer perception and thought.
In other words, synapses are responsible for maintaining smoothly flowing ination pathways in the human body.
Scientists believe they are the keys in studying various brain diseases.
An enormous number of synapses lurk in the human brain, where about 100 billion neuron cells operate. Each cell is composed of up to 10,000 synapses.
As a result, the human brain has roughly 1,000 trillion synapses. But the number keeps declining with age, stabilizing by adulthood at between 100 to 500 trillion.
Super Plants
POSTEC Prof. Hwang succeeded in creating plants that can stand bad conditions such as dry spells, high temperatures and dirty soils as well as polluted air.
Hwang and his crew produced such super plants of Arabidopsis, a flowering plant, and fix their eyes on more practical targets _ rice and lawn.
We found a simple and easy mechanism to create a hormone, abscisic acid (ABA), which controls the plants ability to tolerate highly unfavorable outside conditions, Hwang said.
We proved our success with the Arabidopsis plants and are now striving to make rice plants and lawns, which can grow with minimal amount of water, he said.
The mechanism to control ABA has been heavily sought after as it was the main substance in charge of enabling plants to adjust to changing physiological and environmental conditions.
However, mechanisms for fine-tuning ABA levels remain elusive as it was extremely difficult to produce ABA _ the best way in the past required 15 complicated steps.
In comparison, Hwang discovered that a one-off hydrolysis is enough to make ABA en masse and engineered an enzyme to do so with Arabidopsis.
Hwang projected the commercial outlooks of the newly-found technologies will be limitless and they will bring forth plants tolerant to drought and global warming.
To be theoretical, we will be able to come up with rice plants that can grow in deserts by over-expressing ABA. This will help feed an ever-expanding global population, he said.
As the environment becomes barren at a fast pace, plants with higher ABA level than normal ones will be valuable down the road, Hwang said.
