Kiên Nguyễn

This article addresses the concept “face” in the practices of Vietnamese deference rituals.  It explores how Vietnamese people conceptualize the term “face” regarding the manner of showing respect to the other people in everyday life encounters. Drawing upon the qualitative dataset of my Master’s thesis, in the current article  the author puts to use the concepts “face” and “deference rituals” picked up from Goffman’s theory of social interaction to analyze Vietnamese day-to-day social interaction. The author finds out that the face in the context of social interaction is often classified into two categories: the face of the subordinate and the face of the superordinate. Due to the high status of the latter in Vietnam hierarchy, the loss of their face can cause a great seriousness, whereas, the face of the former is of less importance and often belittled. There is a similarity between Vietnamese “face” and “deference ritual” with that of other countries such as Japan, China, and at ...

The term combinatorial biosynthesis embraces a broad set of methodologies—including genetic engineering, the use of mutants blocked in specific biosynthetic steps, and the exploitation of natural variations in substrates and feeding unnatural substrates—to expand the numbers of compounds generated beyond what can be achieved by genetic engineering alone. For relatively small antibiotic gene clusters, it is possible to isolate complete biosynthetic gene clusters on individual cosmids. Another approach is to clone antibiotic gene clusters in bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) vectors, which can accommodate DNA inserts of >100 kb. The methods discussed in this chapter include some that are specific to nonribosomal peptide synthetases (NRPSs) engineering, including (i) splicing at intermodule or interpeptide linker sites; (ii) recognizing and exploiting the correct type of C domain when coupling fatty acids to L-amino acids (FCL), D-amino acids to L-amino acids (DCL), or L-amino acids to L-amino acids (LCL); and (iii) maintaining the integrity of T-TE didomains when engineering terminal modules. The chapter points out that both S. roseosporus and S. fradiae can be readily manipulated by the genetic engineering methods described. As such, they may be useful hosts for the expression and engineering of other secondary metabolic pathways, particularly other NRPS pathways. For example, the A54145 gene cluster was expressed successfully in an S. roseosporus strain deleted for daptomycin biosynthetic genes.