During fermentation process yeast cells are often exposed to ethanol. Although the toxicity of ethanol to budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae has widely been studied the ethanol stress signaling is still unknown. The growth of the mutants lacking genes involved in the mitogen activated protein kinase (MAPK) pathways was examined under ethanol stress condition. Our results revealed that the STE3 and AKR1 genes involved in the pheromone signaling pathway and the BCK1 MPK1 SWI4 SWI6 and MBP1 genes involved in the cell wall integrity pathway were required for tolerance to ethanol. In addition to the mutants of the cell wall integrity pathway the Δste3 and Δakr1 mutants were sensitive to a cell wall perturbing agent calcoflour white suggesting the role of these signaling molecules in maintaining cell wall during ethanol stress.

The purposes of this research were to build and develop a standardized test used to measure English abilities compliant with the curriculum of the fourth-year students of Rajamangala University of Technology Phra Nakhon. There were two groups of the students namely the first group which consisted of 57 students who took the traditional pilot paper test and the latter which consisted of 63 students taking the electronic test via the Internet. The other purposes were to find out the students/users’ attitudes and satisfaction towards the use of the electronic test and to obtain a computer program prototype for measuring English abilities. The results were as follows: 1. The item analysis of the pilot paper test revealed that there were 64 items of appropriate difficulty index and discrimination power whereas that of the electronic test revealed that only 56 items had appropriate difficulty index and discrimination power. Even though the latter test had been improved the accepted items were fewer. This led to the assumption that the characteristics of doing an electronic test affected students’ decisions and made them guess more than when they took a paper test. 2. The questionnaires analysis of students’ satisfaction of using the electronic test program to measure their English abilities revealed that the overall arithmetic mean was 75.72. The highest scored item of 87.59 percent was “I think this e-test program is useful”; and the lowest scored item of 66.21 percent was “I think the screen format is interesting”. Moreover there were 11 users who showed their positive opinions towards the e-test program which was 18.97 percent of the latter group.

Activated carbon also called activated charcoal or activated coal is a form of carbon that has been processed to make it extremely porous and thus to have a very large surface area available for adsorption or chemical reactions. In this research studies environmental impacts of activated carbon production processes which produced from two types of agricultural by-products namely : coconut shells and palm-oil shells . SimaPro software is applied to evaluate the environmental impacts of both processes. The results have shown that the environmental impacts for the process using coconut shells as raw material is higher than that using palm –oil shells as raw material.

This research aimed to assess the competency for vocational education administrators under Jurisdiction the Office of Vocational Education Commission Ministry of Education by using the Needs Assessment Process to assess their 5 core competencies and 11 functional competencies. The samples were 201 vocational education administrators. The questionnaire was used for data collection. The statistics were percentage mean and standard deviation respectively. The findings were summarized as follows: 1. In overall the vocational education administrators had high levels for core and functional competencies. 2. The competencies were ordered based on its mean as follows: 2.1 Core competencies: moral and ethics good governance team work achievement motivation and expertise 2.2 Functional competencies: self confidence leadership empowering others organization awareness human resources developmentvisionself controlworks control and monitoring analytical thinking communication and strategic orientation.

Heavy metal is one of the major environmental pollutants. However the protective cellular mechanisms in response to heavy metal stress are not well-understood yet. Previously it has been found that the yeast deletion mutants lacking vacuolar H+-ATPase (V-ATPase) activity which functions in vacuolar acidification exhibited growth defects under cadmium stress conditions. In addition several genes involved in H+-ATPase have been recently found to be required for resistance to aluminum. To investigate the roles of vacuolar H+-ATPase plasma membrane H+-ATPase and mitochondrial H+-ATPase in tolerance to cadmium we examined the growth of yeast deletion mutants lacking different types of H+-ATPase in YPD media containing 80 μM of cadmium. Our results showed that a number of mutants lacking V-ATPase activity were sensitive to cadmium suggesting the important role of V-ATPase in cadmium detoxification. We next examined the growth of mutants lacking genes responsible for different vacuolar functions in order to investigate the functional activities of vacuoles involved in cadmium detoxification mechanism. We found that the mutants lacking vacuolar protein-sorting genes exhibited high sensitivity to cadmium as well suggesting the importance of protein transportation during cadmium stress.