The filamentous fungus Aspergillus niger is widely exploited by the fermentation industry for the production of enzymes and organic acids, particularly citric acid. We sequenced the 33.9-megabase genome of A. niger CBS 513.88, the ancestor of currently used enzyme production strains. A high level of synteny was observed with other aspergilli sequenced. Strong function predictions were made for 6,506 of the 14,165 open reading frames identified. A detailed description of the components of the protein secretion pathway was made and striking differences in the hydrolytic enzyme spectra of aspergilli were observed. A reconstructed metabolic network comprising 1,069 unique reactions illustrates the versatile metabolism of A. niger. Noteworthy is the large number of major facilitator superfamily transporters and fungal zinc binuclear cluster transcription factors, and the presence of putative gene clusters for fumonisin and ochratoxin A synthesis.

Measurements provide the basis for process monitoring and control as well as for model development and validation. Systematic approaches to increase the accuracy and credibility of the empirical data set are therefore of great value. In (bio)chemical conversions, linear conservation relations such as the balance equations for charge, enthalpy, and/or chemical elements, can be employed to relate conversion rates. In a pactical situation, some of these rates will be measured (in effect, be calculated directly from primary measurements of, e.g., concentrations and flow rates), as others can or cannot be calculated from the measured ones. When certain measured rates can also be calculated from other measured rates, the set of equations, the accuracy and credibility of the measured rates can indeed be improved by, respectively, balancing and gross error diagnosis. The balanced conversion rates are more accurate, and form a consistent set of data, which is more suitable for further application (e.g., to calculate nonmeasured rates) than the raw measurements. Such an approach has drawn attention in previous studies. The current study deals mainly with the problem of mathematically classifying the conversion rates into balanceable and calculable rates, given the subset of measured rates. The significance of this problem is illustrated with some examples. It is shown that a simple matrix equation can be derived that contains the vector of measured conversion rates and the redundancy matrix R. Matrix R plays a predominant role in the classification problem. In supplementary articles, significance of the redundancy matrix R for an improved gross error diagnosis approach will be shown. In addition, efficient equations have been derived to calculate the balanceable and/or calculable rates. The method is completely based on matrix algebra (principally different from the graph-theoretical approach), and it is easily implemented into a computer program. (c) 1994 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Conservation equations derived from elemental balances, heat balances, and metabolic stoichiometry, can be used to constrain the values of conversion rates of relevant components. In the present work, their use will be discussed for detection and localization of significant errors of the following types: 1.At least one of the primary measurements has a significant error (gross measurement error).2.The system definition is incorrect: a component a.is not included in the system description.b.has a composition different from that specified.3.The specified variances are too small, resulting in a too-sensitive test.The error diagnosis technique presented here, is based on the following: given the conservation equations, for each set of measured rates, a vector of residuals of these equations can be constructed, of which the direction is related to the error source, as its length is a measure of the error size. The similarity of the directions of such a residual vector and certain compare vectors, each corresponding to a specific error source, is considered in a statistical test. If two compare vectors that result from different error sources have (almost) the same direction, errors of these types cannot be distinguished from each other. For each possible error in the primary measurements of flows and concentrations, the compare vector can be constructed a priori, thus allowing analysis beforehand, which errors can be observed. Therefore, the detectability of certain errors likely to occur can be insured by selecting a proper measurement set. The possibility of performing this analysis before experiments are carried out is an important advantage, providing a profound understanding of the detectability of errors. The characteristics of the method with respect to diagnosis of simultaneous errors and error size estimation are discussed and compared to those of the serial elimination method and the serial compensation strategy, published elsewhere. (c) 1994 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Background: Orthology is one of the cornerstones of gene function prediction. Dividing the phylogenetic relations between genes into either orthologs or paralogs is however an oversimplification. Already in two-species gene-phylogenies, the complicated, non-transitive nature of phylogenetic relations results in inparalogs and outparalogs. For situations with more than two species we lack semantics to specifically describe the phylogenetic relations, let alone to exploit them. Published procedures to extract orthologous groups from phylogenetic trees do not allow identification of orthology at various levels of resolution, nor do they document the relations between the orthologous groups.

Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.