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Sucrose and trehalose are commonly used as non-permeating cryoprotectants in cryopreservation, primarily due to their ability to increase extracellular osmolality, which promotes cellular dehydration and minimizes intracellular ice formation. While the effects of these cryoprotectants on clinical outcomes in human oocytes and sperm have been extensively studied, their roles in the vitrification of human embryo remain underexplored. The optimization of cryoprotectants is crucial for improving pregnancy outcomes in assisted reproductive technology (ART), particularly in in vitro fertilization (IVF) and intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) cycles, where surplus embryos or embryos unsuitable for fresh transfer are cryopreserved due to clinical considerations. This study aimed to compare the efficacy of sucrose-based and trehalose-based vitrification solutions for human blastocyst cryopreservation and to evaluate their impact on embryological and clinical outcomes. A retrospective cohort study was performed on 616 patients who underwent frozen embryo transfer (FET) cycles at a single reproductive center from January 2021 to December 2023. The participants were categorized into two groups based on the cryoprotectant used for blastocyst vitrification: sucrose or trehalose. Key outcomes, including implantation rates, proportions of good-quality and poor-quality blastocysts, and clinical pregnancy outcomes, were compared between the groups. A comparative analysis of the sucrose-based and trehalose-based groups yielded the following outcomes: Trehalose-based vitrification solution was associated with improved implantation rates and better post-warming blastocyst quality compared to sucrose-based one. However, since the trehalose-based solution was commercially available, while the sucrose-based solution was laboratory-prepared, the observed differences may not solely be attributed to the type of sugar used. Future studies should aim to clarify the independent effects of trehalose by comparing it with sucrose under standardized conditions within the same type of vitrification solution.

This paper introduces a large-scale spontaneous speech corpus of Korean, named KsponSpeech. This corpus contains 969 h of general open-domain dialog utterances, spoken by about 2000 native Korean speakers in a clean environment. All data were constructed by recording the dialogue of two people freely conversing on a variety of topics and manually transcribing the utterances. The transcription provides a dual transcription consisting of orthography and pronunciation, and disfluency tags for spontaneity of speech, such as filler words, repeated words, and word fragments. This paper also presents the baseline performance of an end-to-end speech recognition model trained with KsponSpeech. In addition, we investigated the performance of standard end-to-end architectures and the number of sub-word units suitable for Korean. We investigated issues that should be considered in spontaneous speech recognition in Korean. KsponSpeech is publicly available on an open data hub site of the Korea government.

This study investigated the inhibitory effect of pine bark extract (PBE) and needle extract on carbohydrate-hydrolyzing enzymes and the hypoglycemic effect in diabetic mice ( Lep ob [ ob/ob]). Pine bark and needle were dried and then placed in ethanol, and the extracts were assayed for the measurement of inhibition mode of PBE against α-amylase (EC 3.2.1.1) and α-glucosidase (EC 3.2.1.20). We also investigated the effect of long-term treatment with extracts on levels of postprandial blood glucose, body weight, food efficiency ratio, and gene expression of glucose transporter-4 in quadriceps muscle in diabetic mice ( Lep ob [ ob/ob]). The PBE showed competitive inhibition against salivary α-amylase and the combination of non-competitive and uncompetitive inhibition against yeast α-glucosidase. In animal experiments, PBE effectively suppressed the increase of postprandial blood glucose level by delaying absorption of diet, and body weights of the group that received PBE were significantly lower than that in the group administered 0.5% carboxylmethyl cellulose (control) 21 d after administration. PBE can be used to suppress postprandial hyperglycemia of diabetic patients. It also can be applied for control of obesity by decreasing the food efficiency ratio, especially carbohydrates.