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Societies depend on interconnected infrastructures that are becoming more complex over the years. Multi-disciplinary knowledge and skills are essential to develop modern infrastructures, requiring close collaboration of various infrastructure owners. To effectively manage and improve inter-organizational collaboration (IOC) in infrastructure construction projects, collaboration status should be assessed continually. This study identifies the assessment criteria, forming the foundation of a tool for assessing the status of IOC in interconnected infrastructure projects.

A systematic literature study and in-depth semi-structured interviews with practitioners in interconnected infrastructure construction projects in the Netherlands are performed to identify the criteria for assessing the status of IOC in infrastructure construction projects, based on which an assessment tool is developed.

The identified assessment criteria through the literature and the practitioner’s perspectives results in the designing and development of a collaboration assessment tool. The assessment tool consists of 12 criteria and 36 sub-criteria from three different categories of collaborative capacity: individual, relational, and organizational.

The assessment tool enables practitioners to monitor the status of IOC between infrastructure owners and assists them in making informed decisions to enhance collaboration. The assessment tool provides the opportunity to assess and analyze the status of collaboration based on three categories (i.e., individual, relational, and organizational).

Iran’s influence on a number of cultural, political, and economic areas including religion and philosophy, literature, science and education, as well as statecraft is surveyed. The chapter also discusses how successive Iranian empires contributed to the growth of world trade and commerce. It is shown that Iran has had a great impact on the world throughout its long history and that its prominent role in contributing to the human heritage stands in sharp contrast to its isolation today, which is construed as a historical anomaly.

This study was conducted with the aim of examining the ability of Saccharomyces cerevisiae to remove AFB₁ from liquid media in order to use data in food and feed systems.

The binding of AFB₁ to Saccharomyces cerevisiae in the late exponential and early stationary phases was studied for viable, heat killed and acid killed yeast. AFB₁ at concentrations (5, 10 and 20 μg/l) was added to the yeast culture (10⁹ cfu/ml) in yeast mold broth medium and incubated at 25°C for 4, 12 and 24 hrs. The aflatoxin binding capacity of the strain was quantified by the amount of unbound AFB₁ using ELISA technique.

The detoxification rate for different treatments reported as follows: acid treated cells > heat treated cells > viable cells. Also, the most reduction in AFB₁ concentration happened within the first four hours of incubation with no significant increase in AFB₁ binding on further incubation because of saturation of active sites in yeast cells. According to the results, either form of Saccharomyces cerevisiae (viable or nonviable) is effective in aflatoxin binding from medium and the binding has a physical nature.

The findings reduce the public concern about aflatoxin B₁ contamination in foods and feeds having high risk of aflatoxin contamination.

No research had been done to assess the ability of Saccharomyces cerevisiae in the mentioned forms to detoxify AFB₁.