In this research, I study the unintended consequences of implementing information technology. Understanding the causes of these unintended effects is important because information technology is ubiquitous in the modern economy. I used three research protocols to study this phenomenon. The first approach was a literature review to explore and understand what was already written on the subject of implementing information technology. The second approach was an experiment using the beer distribution game to study the implementation of information technology. The third approach I used was a case study in which I used system dynamics modeling to study the information technology in an engineering and architecture firm. I tested the implementation of information technology in the beer distribution game by modifying the play with a change that simulated implementing information technology. I compared the performance of test subjects with control groups that played the game at the same time, without the modification. I also compared the subjects' performance against the performance of trials first published in 1989. I hypothesized that implementing information technology would result in an immediate improvement of the teams' performance. The results of implementing information technology in the beer distribution game were not as expected; implementing information technology did not improve performance. When it became clear that my experimental hypotheses were incorrect, I went back to the literature to see if there was an explanation for this failure that could be derived from the literature on the beer game. I studied the information technology in the case study firm in order to extend the learning from the experimental research. The results of the experiment were not as I expected; I learned a great deal about the effect of information technology in a very controlled experimental setting. By expanding the research to include a case study I was able to explore the behavior in a more realistic environment. The beer distribution game provided me with an unexpected insight into the alignment of users mental models and the structure of the organization. The case study was completed using system dynamics tools to model, and then simulate, the effect of misalignment in a real world organization. Considering the results of the beer distribution game and the case study, I suggest that one explanation for the unintended consequences of implementing information technology is the misalignment of users' mental models with the altered structure of the organization after information technology is implemented. / Ph. D.

Mucosal passive immunization is the transfer of active antibodies from one organism to the mucosal surfaces of another organism for preventing or treating infectious diseases. Mucosal passive immunization has a great potential for the prevention and treatment of enteric infections like Rotavirus, which causes more than 114 million episodes of diarrhoea annually with a death toll of more than 450.000 per year. However, the high cost of recombinant antibodies with the current manufacturing systems based on mammalian cells hampers the production of the high antibody quantities required for passive immunization strategies. Alternative expression platforms such as plants could provide higher scalability and reduced costs. Moreover, the use of edible plant organs, which are Generally¿Regarded¿As¿ Safe (GRAS), could reduce manufacturing costs even further by easing the requirements for antibody purification. We analyze here the feasibility of utilizing fruits as inexpensive biofactories of human antibodies that can be orally delivered as crude extracts or partially purified formulations in mucosal passive immunization strategies. In the first section of this thesis, the construction of tomato plants producing a model human Immunoglobulin A (IgA) against rotavirus in their fruits is described. As a result, an elite homozygous line was obtained whose fruits produced on average 41 ¿g of IgA per gram of fresh weigh, equivalent to 0.69 mg IgA per gram of dry tomato powder. Minimally processed products derived from IgA¿expressing tomatoes were shown to strongly inhibit virus infection in an in vitro neutralization assay. Moreover, in order to make IgA¿expressing tomatoes easily distinguishable from wild¿type tomatoes, they were sexually crossed with a transgenic tomato line expressing the genes encoding Antirrhinum majus Rosea1 and Delila transcription factors, which confer purple colour to the fruit. The resulting transgenically¿labelled purple tomatoes contained not only high levels of recombinant neutralizing human IgA but also increased amounts of anthocyanins. In the second section of the thesis the composition of IgA¿expressing tomatoes was analyzed in search of possible unintended effects that could compromise the GRAS status of the final product. To this end, transgenic IgA¿tomatoes were compared with wild type tomatoes and also commercial tomato varieties using proteomic and metabolomic approaches. 2D¿DIGE gels coupled with LC¿MSMS for protein identification showed that all the uptrend differential proteins detected corresponded only to immunoglobulin chains or antibody fragments. On the other hand, non¿targeted metabolite data obtained by UPLC¿MS / Juárez Ortega, P. (2014). Production of recombinant Immunoglobulin A in plants for passive immunotherapy [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/37015 / TESIS