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This study examined the ability of methyl gallate (MG) and gallic acid (GA), the main compounds of gallo-tannins in Galla Rhois, to inhibit the proliferation of oral bacterial and the in vitro formation of Streptococcus mutans biofilms. The antimicrobial activities of these compounds were evaluated in vitro using the broth microdilution method and a beaker-wire test. Both MG and GA had inhibitory effects on the growth of cariogenic (MIC<8 mg/ml) and periodontopathic bacteria (MIC=1 mg/ml). Moreover, these compounds significantly inhibited the in vitro formation of S. mutans biofilms (MG, 1 mg/ml; GA, 4 mg/ml; P<0.05). MG was more effective in inhibiting bacterial growth and the formation of S. mutans biofilm than GA. In conclusion, MG and GA can inhibit the growth of oral pathogens and S. mutans biofilm formation, and may be used to prevent the formation of oral biofilms.

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There have been lots of efforts on the construction of quasi-cyclic (QC) low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes with large girth. However, most of them are focused on protographs with single edges and little research has been done for the construction of QC LDPC codes lifted from protographs with multiple edges. Compared to single-edge protographs, multiple-edge protographs have benefits such that QC LDPC codes lifted from them can potentially have larger minimum Hamming distance. In this paper, all subgraph patterns of multiple-edge protographs, which prevent QC LDPC codes from having large girth by inducing inevitable cycles, are fully investigated based on graph-theoretic approach. By using combinatorial designs, a systematic construction method of multiple-edge protographs is proposed for regular QC LDPC codes with girth at least 12 and also other method is proposed for regular QC LDPC codes with girth at least 14. A construction algorithm of QC LDPC codes by lifting multiple-edge protographs is proposed and it is shown that the resulting QC LDPC codes have larger upper bounds on the minimum Hamming distance than those lifted from single-edge protographs. Simulation results are provided to compare the performance of the proposed QC LDPC codes, the progressive edge-growth (PEG) LDPC codes, and the PEG QC LDPC codes.

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For a high-rate case, it is difficult to randomly construct good low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes of short and moderate lengths because their Tanner graphs are prone to making short cycles.Also, the existing high-rate quasi-cyclic (QC) LDPC codes can be constructed only for very restricted code parameters. In this paper, a new construction method of high-rate regular QC LDPC codes with parity-check matrices consisting of a single row of circulants with the column-weight 3 or 4 is proposed based on special classes of cyclic difference families. The proposed QC LDPC codes can be constructed for various code rates and lengths including the minimum achievable length for a given design rate, which cannot be achieved by the existing high-rate QC LDPC codes. It is observed that the paritycheck matrices of the proposed QC LDPC codes have full rank. It is shown that the error correcting performance of the proposed QC LDPC codes of short and moderate lengths is almost the same as that of the existing ones through numerical analysis.

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