Islamic Studies and Private Universities in South-West Nigeria: Challenges and Prospects

Islamic Studies is one of the core and pertinent courses offered and taught at both private and public universities in Nigeria. The subject prepared its graduates to have potentialities, capabilities man power in teaching, administration, politics, economic, legislation and judiciary in Nigeria. Despite these significant contributions, the subject has confronted with a lot of deprivations in the enrollment of students, recruitment of staff and availability of physical and instructional materials. Based on these, the paper therefore, intends to explore the teaching and learning of Islamic studies in the south west Nigeria private universities, identify problems facing its teaching and learning and proffer solutions to these predicaments. The methodology adopted is analytical with information from both oral interview and written sources from libraries in Nigeria. Among the findings of the study are that the Subject-Islamic studies needs more experts to teach its core courses in private universities in Nigeria and students who wish to enroll for the subject should have rudiments of the discipline before admission.   

Cloning and Sequencing of Mycobacterium Tuberculosis Genes and Used As Dna Vaccines

Tuberculosis (TB) is said to be the oldest disease of history and still considered as a major problem in the world especially in developing countries like Pakistan. It needs continuous efforts to work on its prevention and cure. Mycobacterium tuberculosis (M. tb) bacterium is the etiological agent of this disease and almost one third population of world is infected with it. Almost 1.5 million deaths/year are due to active TB. Asia carries two-third of the total burden of TB, and Pakistan is at 5th position among 22 high burden countries. Efforts are made to control and prevent TB by improving diagnostic tests, effective medication, care through DOTS program and development of new vaccines. BCG vaccine is available as control measure but its efficacy is very limited in most parts of the world. There is need to develop better and state of the art vaccines like DNA vaccines. The current study was designed to produce construct of M. tb genes and later used them as DNA vaccine in mice model. The two M. tb genes SodC and Mpt51 were selected and their gene sequence was downloaded from Tuberculist database. Primers were designed manually. PCR conditions were optimized for each gene and PCR products were confirmed through restriction digestion. PCR products were cloned into pTZ57R/A vector and transformed into chemically competent E.coli cells. The clones were confirmed through restriction digestion and finally by sequence analysis. Finally the constructs were made in pND vector. The finally confirmed clones were stored at -70 C as glycerol stocks and later were used for sub-cloning purposes in mammalian expression vectors to finally develop DNA vaccines. In this regard, twenty Balb/c female mice were used having age of eight weeks each. Eight eight animals were used for inoculation with SodC-pND and Mpt51-pND respectively. Four were used as negative control (Normal Saline group). All animals were bled through tail after three weeks intervals and finally through cardiac puncture at nine weeks post inoculation. All antisera were strongly positive on dot blot and Agar Gel Immunodiffusion test. The results of this study proved that both SodC-pND and Mpt51-pND DNA vaccines are good enough to produce strong humoral response in mice model and hold a promise to be used in anti-TB vaccines in future