A Review on Value Chain in Higher Education

AbstractToday, the universities as higher education instituts are faced with a changing environment.Increasing international competition besides changing management paradigms in higher education, make universities encounter with new challenges. So knowing factors which improve management methods and create competitive advantage is very important. We aim to review researches on value chain in higher education and related fields. Some of these researches applied the basic Porters value chain model in explaining part of the activities. But some of them believe that the Porters model is designed specifically for business enterprises not social services organizations, and higher education as a service sector needs a specific value chain model which can explain process and components of value adding in this sector

Assessment of land suitability and the possibility and performance of a canola (Brassica napus L.) – soybean (Glycine max L.) rotation in four basins of Golestan province, Iran

AbstractA Geographical Information System (GIS)-based plan was used to assess the possibility and performance of a canola (Brassica napus L.) – soybean (Glycine max L.) rotation in Golestan province, one of the most important agricultural production regions of Iran. For this purpose, all needed raster layers, including climatic (precipitation, temperature), topographic (aspects and slope) and soil-related (texture, pH, EC) layers, were provided by interpolation, surface analysis and other related techniques in GIS. Overlaid layers were used to judge the capacity of agricultural lands to rotate a canola–soybean system in the study area, which included four important basins. Based on defined scenarios and pre-determined ecological requirements of the two studied crops, five suitability classes were detected and mapped. Our results indicate that just 11.82% of total lands are very suitable to rotate soybean after canola while most agricultural lands in the study area fell into the moderate and low suitability classes. The consistency of results adopted from final overlaid maps with real statistics in the study region show that GIS as a systemic approach can play a vital role in saving time and reducing research costs. These results could help policy makers to design proper cropping patterns, particularly rotation systems

Clonal fitness inferred from time-series modelling of single-cell cancer genomes

Progress in defining genomic fitness landscapes in cancer, especially those defined by copy number alterations (CNAs), has been impeded by lack of time-series single-cell sampling of polyclonal populations and temporal statistical models1-7. Here we generated 42,000 genomes from multi-year time-series single-cell whole-genome sequencing of breast epithelium and primary triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) patient-derived xenografts (PDXs), revealing the nature of CNA-defined clonal fitness dynamics induced by TP53 mutation and cisplatin chemotherapy. Using a new Wright-Fisher population genetics model8,9 to infer clonal fitness, we found that TP53 mutation alters the fitness landscape, reproducibly distributing fitness over a larger number of clones associated with distinct CNAs. Furthermore, in TNBC PDX models with mutated TP53, inferred fitness coefficients from CNA-based genotypes accurately forecast experimentally enforced clonal competition dynamics. Drug treatment in three long-term serially passaged TNBC PDXs resulted in cisplatin-resistant clones emerging from low-fitness phylogenetic lineages in the untreated setting. Conversely, high-fitness clones from treatment-naive controls were eradicated, signalling an inversion of the fitness landscape. Finally, upon release of drug, selection pressure dynamics were reversed, indicating a fitness cost of treatment resistance. Together, our findings define clonal fitness linked to both CNA and therapeutic resistance in polyclonal tumours