Counterfeit medicines are a fundamental security problem. Counterfeiting medication poses a tremendous threat to patient safety, public health, and the economy in developed and less developed countries. Current solutions are often vulnerable due to the limited security levels. We propose that the highest protection against counterfeit medicines would be a combination of a physically unclonable function (PUF) with on-dose authentication. A PUF can provide a digital fingerprint with multiple pairs of input challenges and output responses. On-dose authentication can verify every individual pill without removing the identification tag. Here, we report on-dose PUFs that can be directly attached onto the surface of medicines, be swallowed, and digested. Fluorescent proteins and silk proteins serve as edible photonic biomaterials and the photoluminescent properties provide parametric support of challenge-response pairs. Such edible cryptographic primitives can play an important role in pharmaceutical anti-counterfeiting and other security applications requiring immediate destruction or vanishing features.

The antibacterial activity of immune-related peptides, identified by a differential gene expression analysis, was investigated to suggest novel antibacterial peptides. A cDNA encoding a defensin-like peptide, Coprisin, was isolated from bacteria-immunized dung beetle, Copris tripartitus, by using differential dot blot hybridization. Northern blot analysis showed that Coprisin mRNA was up-regulated from 4 hours after bacteria injection and its expression level was reached a peak at 16 hours. The deduced amino acid sequence of Coprisin was composed of 80 amino acids with a predicted molecular weight of 8.6 kDa and a pI of 8.7. The amino acid sequence of mature Coprisin was found to be 79.1% and 67.4% identical to those of defensin-like peptides of Anomala cuprea and Allomyrina dichotoma, respectively. We also investigated active sequences of Coprisin by using amino acid modification. The result showed that the 9-mer peptide, LLCIALRKK-NH2, exhibited potent antibacterial activities against Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus aureus.

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Background Antheraea yamamai, also known as the Japanese oak silk moth, is a wild species of silk moth. Silk produced by A. yamamai, referred to as tensan silk, shows different characteristics such as thickness, compressive elasticity, and chemical resistance compared with common silk produced from the domesticated silkworm, Bombyx mori. Its unique characteristics have led to its use in many research fields including biotechnology and medical science, and the scientific as well as economic importance of the wild silk moth continues to gradually increase. However, no genomic information for the wild silk moth, including A. yamamai, is currently available.FindingsIn order to construct the A. yamamai genome, a total of 147G base pairs using Illumina and Pacbio sequencing platforms were generated, providing 210-fold coverage based on the 700-Mb estimated genome size of A. yamamai. The assembled genome of A. yamamai was 656 Mb (>2 kb) with 3675 scaffolds, and the N50 length of assembly was 739 Kb with a 34.07% GC ratio. Identified repeat elements covered 37.33% of the total genome, and the completeness of the constructed genome assembly was estimated to be 96.7% by Benchmarking Universal Single-Copy Orthologs v2 analysis. A total of 15 481 genes were identified using Evidence Modeler based on the gene prediction results obtained from 3 different methods (ab initio, RNA-seq-based, known-gene-based) and manual curation.ConclusionsHere we present the genome sequence of A. yamamai, the first genome sequence of the wild silk moth. These results provide valuable genomic information, which will help enrich our understanding of the molecular mechanisms relating to not only specific phenotypes such as wild silk itself but also the genomic evolution of Saturniidae.

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The genetic divergence, population genetic structure, and possible speciation of the Korean firefly, Pyrocoelia rufa, were investigated on the midsouthern Korean mainland, coastal islets, a remote offshore island, Jedu-do, and Tsushima Island in Japan. Analysis of DNA sequences from the mitochondrial COI protein-coding gene revealed 20 mtDNA-sequence-based haplotypes with a maximum divergence of 5.5%. Phylogenetic analyses using PAUP, PHYLIP, and networks subdivided the P. rufa into two clades (termed clade A and B) and the minimum nucleotide divergence between them was 3.7%. Clade A occurred throughout the Korean mainland and the coastal islets and Tsushima Island in Japan, whereas clade B was exclusively found on Jeju-do Island. In the analysis of the population genetic structure, clade B formed an independent phylogeographic group, but clade A was further subdivided into three groups: two covering western and eastern parts of the Korean peninsula, respectively, and the other occupying one eastern coastal islet and Japanese Tsushima Island. Considering both phylogeny and population structure of P. rufa, the Jeju-do Island population is obviously differentiated from other P. rufa populations, but the Tsushima Island population was a subset of the Korean coastal islet, Geoje. We interpreted the isolation of the Jeju-do population and the grouping of Tsushima Island with Korean coastal islets in terms of Late Pleistocene-Holocene events. The eastern-western subdivision on the Korean mainland was interpreted partially by the presence of a large major mountain range, which bisects the midpart of the Korean peninsula into western and eastern parts.

Plasmon-enhanced photoluminescence of fluorescent (mKate2) silk embedded with silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) as multifunctional photonic nanomaterials with flexibility and scalability.

In Korea, a new Bombyx mori (Lepidoptera: Bombycidae) strain, which has a peculiar larval body marking was bred to draw public attention to the importance of national resources. We sequenced the complete mitochondrial genome (mitogenome) of the strain "Hukpyobeom" and phylogenetic relationships of the strain were analyzed. The complete genome of the strain comprised 15,671 bp, contained a typical set of genes of animals, and had a gene arrangement and composition typical in Lepidoptera. The newly bred "Hukpyobeom" strain had a 20-50 bp longer whole genome size, 39 bp longer protein-coding genes, and 5-23 bp shorter intergenic spacer regions compared to the other strains. Phylogenetic analyses showed the "Hukpyobeom" to form a strong subgroup together with each one Japan-and China-originated strain. A strain originating from Russia (strain name Soviet_Union_No.1) was placed as the most basal lineage, forming a sister to the remaining strains, indicating genetic divergence within B. mori.