Human umbilical cord blood (UCB) has been regarded as an alternative source for cell transplantation and cell therapy because of its hematopoietic and nonhematopoietic (mesenchymal) potential. Although there has been debate about whether mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) are invariably present in UCB, several reports showed that MSC‐like cells could be consistently derived from human UCB and, moreover, could differentiate into various cells of a mesodermal origin. However, it remains unclear whether these UCB‐derived MSCs are also capable of differentiating into skeletal muscle cells. In this study, we isolated MSCs from human UCB and induced them to differentiate into skeletal muscle cells. During cell culture expansion, UCB‐derived mononuclear cells gave rise to adherent layers of fibroblast‐like cells expressing MSC‐related antigens such as SH2, SH3, α‐smooth muscle actin, CD13, CD29, and CD49e. More important, when these UCB‐derived MSCs were incubated in promyogenic conditions for up to 6 weeks, they expressed myogenic markers in accordance with myogenic differentiation pattern. Both flow cytometric and reverse transcriptase–polymerase reaction analyses showed that two early myogenic markers, MyoD and myogenin, were expressed after 3 days of incubation but not after 2 weeks. At week 6, more than half of UCB‐derived MSCs expressed myosin heavy chain, a late myogenic marker. Our results demonstrate that UCB‐derived MSCs possess a potential of skeletal myogenic differentiation and also imply that these cells could be a suitable source for skeletal muscle repair and a useful tool of muscle‐related tissue engineering.

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Human umbilical cord blood (UCB) contains hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) and mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs), both of which are regarded as valuable sources for cell transplantation and cell therapy. Adherent cells expressing MSCs-related antigens such as SH2, CD13, CD29, and ASMA, have been isolated from a mononuclear cell fraction of human UCB. Under proneurogenic conditions, these UCB-derived adherent cells rapidly assumed the morphology of multipolar neurons. Both immunofluorescence and RT-PCR analyses indicated that the expression of a number of neural markers including Tuj1, TrkA, GFAP and CNPases, was markedly elevated during this acute differentiation. The neurogenic potential of UCB-derived may facilitate stem cell therapeutic approaches to neurodegenerative diseases.

On-line game service is the hottest game genre today, and one of major on-line game is MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena) game. In MOBA games, the collaboration of team players and team strategy are vital elements together, besides the individual player's game control capability. Thus important issue for the MOBA service providers is to detect bad players showing abnormal plays or appearances in games with embedded malicious intentions. Previous approach had been presented to cope with such players; however they have not yet shown any promising results to judge each player. In this paper, we propose an efficient and automatic abnormal player decision support scheme using PageRank and normal distribution to find and judge bad players. Our scheme computes BPR (bad player ranking) for each user, and BPR can be used in service provider's final decision to decide a specific user as an abnormal player. Our scheme has main advantage that it requires small computational efforts to identify bad players, because we utilize PageRank algorithm which shows efficient computation and information search capability.

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