STUDIES ON PROTECTIVE EFFECTS OF A VACCINE, BASED ON RECOMBINANT Ag85, TB10 AND FliC PROTEINS

At present time, there is an obvious need for a new generation of vaccines as the most effective preventive approach, in order to stop spreading of tuberculosis infection. So far, the most popular strategy is aimed at heterological vaccination. The idea is to use BCG, or improved BCG, or attenuated M. tuberculosis for primary vaccination. For the further booster vaccination one may apply thw s.c. subunit or vector vaccines, containing protective mycobacterial proteins. The aim of our investigation was to evaluate protective effects of a new vaccine based on recombinant bacterial proteins Ag85, ТВ10 and FliC. We used a model with aerosol M. tuberculosis H37Rv infection, and compared lung and spleen CFU counts and life-span of vaccinated versus non-vaccinated С57BL/6 mice. As a result, we revealed three vaccine variants with comparable protective capacity against BCG using our experimental model. The most promising variant is suggested for testing in preclinical trials

Institutional investors and corporate governance

We provide a comprehensive overview of the role of institutional investors in corporate governance with three main components. First, we establish new stylized facts documenting the evolution and importance of institutional ownership. Second, we provide a detailed characterization of key aspects of the legal and regulatory setting within which institutional investors govern portfolio firms. Third, we synthesize the evolving response of the recent theoretical and empirical academic literature in finance to the emergence of institutional investors in corporate governance. We highlight how the defining aspect of institutional investors – the fact that they are financial intermediaries – differentiates them in their governance role from standard principal blockholders. Further, not all institutional investors are identical, and we pay close attention to heterogeneity amongst institutional investors as blockholders

Stability of Yellow Fever Virus under Recombinatory Pressure as Compared with Chikungunya Virus

Recombination is a mechanism whereby positive sense single stranded RNA viruses exchange segments of genetic information. Recent phylogenetic analyses of naturally occurring recombinant flaviviruses have raised concerns regarding the potential for the emergence of virulent recombinants either post-vaccination or following co-infection with two distinct wild-type viruses. To characterize the conditions and sequences that favor RNA arthropod-borne virus recombination we constructed yellow fever virus (YFV) 17D recombinant crosses containing complementary deletions in the envelope protein coding sequence. These constructs were designed to strongly favor recombination, and the detection conditions were optimized to achieve high sensitivity recovery of putative recombinants. Full length recombinant YFV 17D virus was never detected under any of the experimental conditions examined, despite achieving estimated YFV replicon co-infection levels of ∼2.4×106 in BHK-21 (vertebrate) cells and ∼1.05×105 in C710 (arthropod) cells. Additionally YFV 17D superinfection resistance was observed in vertebrate and arthropod cells harboring a primary infection with wild-type YFV Asibi strain. Furthermore recombination potential was also evaluated using similarly designed chikungunya virus (CHIKV) replicons towards validation of this strategy for recombination detection. Non-homologus recombination was observed for CHIKV within the structural gene coding sequence resulting in an in-frame duplication of capsid and E3 gene. Based on these data, it is concluded that even in the unlikely event of a high level acute co-infection of two distinct YFV genomes in an arthropod or vertebrate host, the generation of viable flavivirus recombinants is extremely unlikely

Choice of Financing Mode as a Stochastic Bounded Control Problem

In this note I analyze situations where an entrepreneur needs external financing from an outside investor in order to start an investment project that will yield a profit for two consecutive periods. The value of second-period profit is the entrepreneur's private information. I show that the choice of financing mode can be transformed into an optimal stochastic bounded control problem, where the state variable t represents the investor's first-period payoff and the control variable α can be interpreted in terms of the investor's residual profit rights. I then show that under certain general conditions such as the monotonicity and continuity of t (which have clear economic interpretations), an optimal contract is characterized by maximal α under low values of t and minimal α under high values of t. In economic terms this corresponds to debt

About the Problem of Archetype Determination of the Scripts of Social Interaction

В статье анализируются бессознательные процессы, обуславливающие экзистенциальную динамику души человека и выражающиеся в имагинативных способах презентации архетипов коллективного бессознательного в сознании индивида. На основании этого делается вывод о наличии двух основных моделей реализации архетипов в пространстве социального взаимодействия. Формируя творческий и консервирующий сценарии архетипического самоосуществления человека, они, в свою очередь, детерминируют культурные и цивилизационные контуры его бытия.This article is about unconscious processes determined the existential dynamics of human's soul and expressed in figurative ways of the presentation of archetypes of collective unconscious in individual consciousness. On the base of it there has been made a conclusion about the presence of two basic models of the realization of archetypes in the space of social interaction. Forming creative and conserving scripts of archetypes human's self-realization, it determines cultural and a civilized feature of human's being