During high growth era companies are making technical progress in automation and centralization of the plants, which needs large amount of manual work to maintain the automation systems. The strategy of maintaining the equipment of a plant is crucial for the effectiveness of manufacturing. Total productive maintenance (TPM) is a maintenance program, which involves concepts for maintaining plant...

BACKGROUND Despite extensive research in the last decades, microalgae are still only economically feasible for high valued markets. Strain improvement is a strategy to increase productivities, hence reducing costs. In this work, we focus on microalgae selection: taking advantage of the natural biological variability of species to select variations based on desired characteristics. We focused on...

BACKGROUND Pichia pastoris is one of the most important host organisms for the recombinant production of proteins in industrial biotechnology. To date, strain specific parameters, which are needed to set up feeding profiles for fed batch cultivations, are determined by time-consuming continuous cultures or consecutive fed batch cultivations, operated at different parameter sets. RESULTS Here,...

In this research we employ data envelopment analysis (DEA) to measure the Malmquist productivity of semiconductor packaging and testing firms in Taiwan from 2000 to 2003. Malmquist productivity has three components: the measurement of technical change, the measurement of the frontier forward shift, and the measurement of the frontier backward shift of a company over two consecutive periods. Thi...

It is increasingly attractive to engineer cyanobacteria for bulk production of chemicals from CO2. However, cofactor bias of cyanobacteria is different from bacteria that prefer NADH, which hampers cyanobacterial strain engineering. In this study, the key enzyme d-lactate dehydrogenase (LdhD) from Lactobacillus bulgaricus ATCC11842 was engineered to reverse its favored cofactor from NADH to NAD...