The IgG found in serum of hen is accumulated into egg yolk to provide an acquired immunity to the offspring. An antibody in egg yolk has been referred to as IgY. It is now possible to produce specific IgY through eggs from hens immunized with a given antigen (proteins, bacteria, and viruses) instead of producing IgG through the blood of immunized animal such as rabbits or goats. One of useful application of IgY is in the fields of diagnosis using its binding specificity to given antigens as same as that of mammalian serum IgG. Another important use of IgY is for passive immunization therapy wherein its specific binding ability to the antigens (pathogens, venoms, etc.) serves to neutralize the pathogenicity of antigen. In this article, applications of IgY in diagnosis reagents and in prevention of infectious diseases are introduced.

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Cosmetics and health food ingredients development from natural resources has been one of the recent approaches for product development. The process of research and development starts from identifying the potential natural resources, screening them to discover new efficacies by different in-vitro test methods, safety assessment of the selected products, confirmation of efficacies by clinical trials and finally introducing the product to the market. This paper reviews efficacies and application methods of some of the products containing lipophilic compounds such as Spingolipid (Ceramide) from YUZU, Glucosylceramide from Rice, and Cyanropicrin from Artichoke etc.

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Large number of natural products have been evaluated as potential chemopreventive agents. Epidemiological studies have shown that dietary phytochemicals provide beneficial effects on cancer prevention. In this context, α-Mangostin was found to have a cancer preventive effect in rat carcinogenesis bioassay and apoptosis-inducing activity in human cancer cell lines by targeting mitochondria. Furthermore, the extract from pericarps, which contains mainly α-mangostin and γ-rmangostin, exhibited an enhancement of NK cell activity in a mouse model. These findings could provide a relevant basis for the development of xanthones as an agent for cancer prevention.

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