Analysis of Expressed Sequence Tags from the Fungus Aspergillus oryzae Cultured Under Different Conditions

We performed random sequencing of cDNAs from nine biologically or industrially important cultures of the industrially valuable fungus Aspergillus oryzae to obtain expressed sequence tags (ESTs). Consequently, 21 446 raw ESTs were accumulated and subsequently assembled to 7589 non-redundant consensus sequences (contigs). Among all contigs, 5491 (72.4%) were derived from only a particular culture. These included 4735 (62.4%) singletons, i.e. lone ESTs overlapping with no others. These data showed that consideration of culture grown under various conditions as cDNA sources enabled efficient collection of ESTs. BLAST searches against the public databases showed that 2953 (38.9%) of the EST contigs showed significant similarities to deposited sequences with known functions, 793 (10.5%) were similar to hypothetical proteins, and the remaining 3843 (50.6%) showed no significant similarity to sequences in the databases. Culture-specific contigs were extracted on the basis of the EST frequency normalized by the total number for each culture condition. In addition, contig sequences were compared with sequence sets in eukaryotic orthologous groups (KOGs), and classified into the KOG functional categories

Meeting the cultural and service needs of Arabic international students by using QFD

Quality has become an important factor in global competition for many reasons. Intensive global competition and the demand for better quality by customers has led organizations to realize the benefits of providing quality products and services in order to successfully compete and survive. Higher education institutions are one example of these organisations. Higher education institutions work in an intensive competitive environment worldwide driven by increasing demands for learning by local and international students. As a result, the managers of these sectors have realized that improving the quality of services is important for achieving customer satisfaction which can help survival in an internationally competitive market. To do this, it is necessary for organizations to know their customers and identify their requirements. To this end, many higher education institutions have adopted principles of total quality management (TQM) to improve their education quality which leads to better performance through involvement of every department to achieve excellence in business. This chapter considers the importance of measuring quality in order to assist universities to proactively manage the design and improvement of the social and academic experiences of postgraduate international students, and plan management decision-making processes to deliver high-quality services in a globalized business of provision of higher education. Higher education institutions must operate effectively and efficiently and be able to deliver quality programs, by seeking to better understand the needs of their customers to be competitive in this market space

Display of both N- and C-terminal target fusion proteins on the Aspergillus oryzae cell surface using a chitin-binding module

A novel cell surface display system in Aspergillus oryzae was established by using a chitin-binding module (CBM) from Saccharomyces cerevisiae as an anchor protein. CBM was fused to the N or C terminus of green fluorescent protein (GFP) and the fusion proteins (GFP-CBM and CBM-GFP) were expressed using A. oryzae as a host. Western blotting and fluorescence microscopy analysis showed that both GFP-CBM and CBM-GFP were successfully expressed on the cell surface. In addition, cell surface display of triacylglycerol lipase from A. oryzae (tglA), while retaining its activity, was also successfully demonstrated using CBM as an anchor protein. The activity of tglA was significantly higher when tglA was fused to the C terminus than N terminus of CBM. Together, these results show that CBM used as a first anchor protein enables the fusion of both the N and/or C terminus of a target protein

QFD Application in Software Process Management and Improvement Based on CMM

Capability Maturity Model (CMM) from Software Engineering Institute has been used successfully by many organizations for software process improvement. However, there exists a disconnection between business goals and maturity levels. A new framework using Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is developed to deal with this problem. This framework serves three purposes: (1) it provides a connection between business requirements and CMM; (2) it proposed a methodology for the priority assessment of requirements from multiple perspectives; and (3) it helps identify a set of software process improvement actions based on business requirements and CMM