• Journal of Life Science
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• v.28 no.10
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• pp.1244-1253
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• 2018

Rumen microbiome consists of a wide variety of microorganisms, such as bacteria, archaea, protozoa, fungi, and viruses, that are in a symbiotic relationship in a strict anaerobic environment in the rumen. These rumen microbiome, a vital maker, play a significant role in feed fermentation within the rumen and produce different volatile fatty acids (VFAs). VFAs are essential for energy metabolism and protein synthesis of the host animal, even though emission of methane gas after feed fermentation is considered a negative indicator of loss of dietary energy of the host animal. To improve rumen microbial efficiency, a variety of approaches, such as feed formulation, the addition of natural feed additives, dietary feed-microbes, etc., have taken to increase ruminant performance. Recently with the application of high-throughput sequencing or next-generation sequencing technologies, especially for metagenomics and metatranscriptomics of rumen microbiomes, our understanding of rumen microbial diversity and function has significantly increased. The metaproteome and metabolome provide deeper insights into the complicated microbial network of the rumen ecosystem and its response to different ruminant diets to improve efficiency in animal production. This review summarized some recent advances of rumen microbiome techniques, especially "meta-omics," viz. metagenomic, metatranscriptomic, metaproteomic, and metabolomic techniques to increase feed fermentation and utilization in ruminants.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.15 no.6
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• pp.27-42
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• 2020

Startup accelerators have emerged as new investment entities that help early startups, which are not easy to survive continuously due to lack of funds, commercialization capabilities, and experiences. As their positive performance on early startups and the ecosystem has been proven, the number of early startups which want to receive their investment is also increasing. However, they are vaguely preparing to attract accelerators' investment because they do not have any information on what factors the accelerators consider important. In addition, researches on startup accelerators are also at an early level, so there are no remarkable prior studies on factors that decide on investment. Therefore, this study aims to help startups prepare for investment attraction by looking at what factors are important for accelerators to invest, and to provide meaningful implications to academia. In the preceding study, we derived five upper level categories, 26 lower level accelerators' investment determinants through the qualitative meta-synthesis method, secondary data analysis, observation on US accelerators and in-depth interviews. In this study, we want to derive important implications by deriving priorities of the accelerators' investment determinants. Therefore, we used AHP that are evaluated as the suitable methodology for deriving importance and priority. The analysis results show that accelerators value market-related factors most. This means that startups that are subject to investment by accelerators are early-stage startups, and many companies have not fully developed their products or services. Therefore, market-related factors that can be evaluated objectively seem to be more important than products (or services) that are still ambiguous. Next, it was found that the factors related to the internal workforce of startups are more important. Since accelerators want to develop their businesses together with start-ups and team members through mentoring, ease of collaboration with them is very important, which seems to be important. The overall priority analysis results of the 26 investment determinants show that 'customer needs' and 'founders and team members' understanding of customers and markets' (0.62) are important and high priority factors. The results also show that startup accelerators consider the customer-centered perspective very important. And among the factors related to startups, the most prominent factor was the founder's openness and execution ability. Therefore, it can be confirmed that accelerators consider the ease of collaboration with these startups very important.