Unpacking the ERP investment decision: An empirical assessment of the benefits and risks

This paper presents the results of a survey conducted amongst European retailers on their plans and perceptions with regard to novel applications based on Near Field Communication (NFC) technology. Whilst the survey showed that retailers did evaluate the possible applications differently, none of them clearly stood out as the most beneficial one. NFC based services were on average conceded to be able to accelerate the checkout process at the point-of-sale. This is an important acknowledgment, as 65% of the respondents consider waiting lines which can occur at the checkout to hold the largest potential for an improvement of their customers’ shopping experience. While the rate of agreement is somewhat smaller than in the case of process acceleration, retailers also concede that NFC applications could make shopping more convenient for their customers. On the other hand, none of the NFC-based applications seemed to yield cost saving potentials to the responding retailers. The most surprising result of the survey was the respondents’ low expectations in regards to customer acceptance. This is in clear contrast to the reports on NFC trials which generally describe participants as enthusiastic about the technology

Effect of starvation and temperature on gonad development of baby clam, Marcia opima (Gmelin)

For studying the influence of feed and temperature on gonad growth and maturity of the baby clam Marcia opima, experiments were conducted for 45 days at temperatures of 23°C and 28°C. The progress of gonadal recovery was followed by periodic determination of gonadosomatic index, condition index, digestive gland index and oocyte diameter. There was significant difference in the gonadosomatic index between fed and unfed clams at 23°C and 28°C. No significant difference in the gonadosomatic index was noted in the fed treatments at 23°C and 28°C, but the time of conditioning had significant influence on the gonadosomatic index. A significant relationship was found between the gonadosomatic index and condition index of the clams in all the treatment

Chassis organism from Corynebacterium glutamicum – a top-down approach to identify and delete irrelevant gene clusters

Unthan S, Baumgart M, Radek A, et al. Chassis organism from Corynebacterium glutamicum – a top-down approach to identify and delete irrelevant gene clusters. Biotechnology Journal. 2015;10(2):290-301

Nutritional Systems Biology Modeling: From Molecular Mechanisms to Physiology

The use of computational modeling and simulation has increased in many biological fields, but despite their potential these techniques are only marginally applied in nutritional sciences. Nevertheless, recent applications of modeling have been instrumental in answering important nutritional questions from the cellular up to the physiological levels. Capturing the complexity of today's important nutritional research questions poses a challenge for modeling to become truly integrative in the consideration and interpretation of experimental data at widely differing scales of space and time. In this review, we discuss a selection of available modeling approaches and applications relevant for nutrition. We then put these models into perspective by categorizing them according to their space and time domain. Through this categorization process, we identified a dearth of models that consider processes occurring between the microscopic and macroscopic scale. We propose a “middle-out” strategy to develop the required full-scale, multilevel computational models. Exhaustive and accurate phenotyping, the use of the virtual patient concept, and the development of biomarkers from “-omics” signatures are identified as key elements of a successful systems biology modeling approach in nutrition research—one that integrates physiological mechanisms and data at multiple space and time scales

Modelling human choices: MADeM and decision‑making

Research supported by FAPESP 2015/50122-0 and DFG-GRTK 1740/2. RP and AR are also part of the Research, Innovation and Dissemination Center for Neuromathematics FAPESP grant (2013/07699-0). RP is supported by a FAPESP scholarship (2013/25667-8). ACR is partially supported by a CNPq fellowship (grant 306251/2014-0)

NFC based service innovation in retail: An explorative study

This paper presents the results of a survey conducted amongst European retailers on their plans and perceptions with regard to novel applications based on Near Field Communication (NFC) technology. Whilst the survey showed that retailers did evaluate the possible applications differently, none of them clearly stood out as the most beneficial one. NFC based services were on average conceded to be able to accelerate the checkout process at the point-of-sale. This is an important acknowledgment, as 65% of the respondents consider waiting lines which can occur at the checkout to hold the largest potential for an improvement of their customers’ shopping experience. While the rate of agreement is somewhat smaller than in the case of process acceleration, retailers also concede that NFC applications could make shopping more convenient for their customers. On the other hand, none of the NFC-based applications seemed to yield cost saving potentials to the responding retailers. The most surprising result of the survey was the respondents’ low expectations in regards to customer acceptance. This is in clear contrast to the reports on NFC trials which generally describe participants as enthusiastic about the technology

Bioprocess automation on a Mini Pilot Plant enables fast quantitative microbial phenotyping

BackgroundThe throughput of cultivation experiments in bioprocess development has drastically increased in recent years due to the availability of sophisticated microliter scale cultivation devices. However, as these devices still require time-consuming manual work, the bottleneck was merely shifted to media preparation, inoculation and finally the analyses of cultivation samples. A first step towards solving these issues was undertaken in our former study by embedding a BioLector in a robotic workstation. This workstation already allowed for the optimization of heterologous protein production processes, but remained limited when aiming for the characterization of small molecule producer strains. In this work, we extended our workstation to a versatile Mini Pilot Plant (MPP) by integrating further robotic workflows and microtiter plate assays that now enable a fast and accurate phenotyping of a broad range of microbial production hosts.ResultsA fully automated harvest procedure was established, which repeatedly samples up to 48 wells from BioLector cultivations in response to individually defined trigger conditions. The samples are automatically clarified by centrifugation and finally frozen for subsequent analyses. Sensitive metabolite assays in 384-well plate scale were integrated on the MPP for the direct determination of substrate uptake (specifically D-glucose and D-xylose) and product formation (specifically amino acids). In a first application, we characterized a set of Corynebacterium glutamicum L-lysine producer strains and could rapidly identify a unique strain showing increased L-lysine titers, which was subsequently confirmed in lab-scale bioreactor experiments. In a second study, we analyzed the substrate uptake kinetics of a previously constructed D-xylose-converting C. glutamicum strain during cultivation on mixed carbon sources in a fully automated experiment.ConclusionsThe presented MPP is designed to face the challenges typically encountered during early-stage bioprocess development. Especially the bottleneck of sample analyses from fast and parallelized microtiter plate cultivations can be solved using cutting-edge robotic automation. As robotic workstations become increasingly attractive for biotechnological research, we expect our setup to become a template for future bioprocess development

Quantitative Physiology of Single Cells for Linking Phenotype and Environment

Dusny C, Grünberger A, Rosenthal K, Wiechert W, Schmid A. Quantitative Physiology of Single Cells for Linking Phenotype and Environment. Presented at the 24th Annual Conference of the German Society for Flow Cytometry, Dresden, Germany