The Dominant Position of Regional Facilities for the Processing of Municipal Waste

This paper addresses the issue of the functioning of regional facilities for the processing of municipal waste in the light of the provisions of the Competition and Consumer Protection Act of 16 February 2007. The authors seek answers to the question of whether in certain specific situations it is possible to conclude that a given facility holds a dominant position on the market in which it operates. Two situations will be subjected to close analysis, namely those in which only one or two facilities with RMWPF status operate in a given region of municipal waste management

Intracellular logistics : sorting nexins in retrograde transport of endogenous and exogenous cargo

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Społeczne budownictwo czynszowe jako usługa w ogólnym interesie gospodarczym

Social rental housing is one of the possible instruments which are applied to ensure the satisfaction of housing needs. However, public funds which are transferred to entities that operate within this area should be usually classified as State aid. The analysis presented in this paper concerns the following question: is it possible to consider the operation of a social rental housing program as services of general economic interest. This question seems to be a topical issue because of a new legislative initiative aiming at establishing a governmental housing program that was implemented by the Act of 10 September 2015 which amended the Act on certain forms of supporting housing construction. The aforementioned program stipulates the legal frames for refundable and preferential financing that may be granted to specific entities in order to realise investments in social rental housing. The governmental housing program complements earlier local housing policies in force. What is significant is that the Polish legislator decided to qualify support granted as services of general economic interest, as referred to in Commission Decision 2012/21/UE of 20 December 2011 on the Application of Article 106(2) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union to State aid in the form of public service compensation granted to certain undertakings entrusted with the operation of services of general economic interest. Applying Commission Decision 2012/21/UE to this situation raises some doubts as to the lack of clarity of a term “social housing”. Due to a certain controversy over the abovementioned issue, the authors have attempted to examine whether the application of preferential provisions of Commission Decision 2012/21/UE to the social housing program is in accordance with the relevant provisions of EU competition rules

Dual Function of CD81 in Influenza Virus Uncoating and Budding

As an obligatory pathogen, influenza virus co-opts host cell machinery to harbor infection and to produce progeny viruses. In order to characterize the virus-host cell interactions, several genome-wide siRNA screens and proteomic analyses have been performed recently to identify host factors involved in influenza virus infection. CD81 has emerged as one of the top candidates in two siRNA screens and one proteomic study. The exact role played by CD81 in influenza infection, however, has not been elucidated thus far. In this work, we examined the effect of CD81 depletion on the major steps of the influenza infection. We found that CD81 primarily affected virus infection at two stages: viral uncoating during entry and virus budding. CD81 marked a specific endosomal population and about half of the fused influenza virus particles underwent fusion within the CD81-positive endosomes. Depletion of CD81 resulted in a substantial defect in viral fusion and infection. During virus assembly, CD81 was recruited to virus budding site on the plasma membrane, and in particular, to specific sub-viral locations. For spherical and slightly elongated influenza virus, CD81 was localized at both the growing tip and the budding neck of the progeny viruses. CD81 knockdown led to a budding defect and resulted in elongated budding virions with a higher propensity to remain attached to the plasma membrane. Progeny virus production was markedly reduced in CD81-knockdown cells even when the uncoating defect was compensated. In filamentous virus, CD81 was distributed at multiple sites along the viral filament. Taken together, these results demonstrate important roles of CD81 in both entry and budding stages of the influenza infection cycle

Hybrid Evolutionary Approach to Multi-objective Path Planning for UAVs

The goal of Multi-Objective Path Planning (MOPP) is to find Pareto-optimal paths for autonomous agents with respect to several optimization goals like minimizing risk, path length, travel time, or energy consumption. In this work, we formulate a MOPP for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). We utilize a path representation based on Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines (NURBS) and propose a hybrid evolutionary approach combining an Evolution Strategy (ES) with the exact Dijkstra algorithm. Moreover, we compare our approach in a statistical analysis to state-of-the-art exact (Dijkstra's algorithm), gradient-based (L-BFGS-B), and evolutionary (NSGA-II) algorithms with respect to calculation time and quality features of the obtained Pareto fronts indicating convergence and diversity of the solutions. We evaluate the methods on a realistic 2D urban path planning scenario based on real-world data exported from OpenStreetMap. The examination's results indicate that our approach is able to find significantly better solutions for the formulated problem than standard Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs). Moreover, the proposed method is able to obtain more diverse sets of trade-off solutions for different objectives than the standard exact approaches. Thus, the method combines the strengths of both approaches

The mammalian phosphatidylinositol 3-phosphate 5-kinase (PIKfyve) regulates endosome-to-TGN retrograde transport

The yeast gene fab1 and its mammalian orthologue Pip5k3 encode the phosphatidylinositol 3-phosphate [PtdIns(3)P] 5-kinases Fab1p and PIKfyve, respectively, enzymes that generates phosphatidylinositol 3,5-bisphosphate [PtdIns(3,5)P(2)]. A shared feature of fab1Delta yeast cells and mammalian cells overexpressing a kinase-dead PIKfyve mutant is the formation of a swollen vacuolar phenotype: a phenotype that is suggestive of a conserved function for these enzymes and their product, PtdIns(3,5)P(2), in the regulation of endomembrane homeostasis. In the current study, fixed and live cell imaging has established that, when overexpressed at low levels in HeLa cells, PIKfyve is predominantly associated with dynamic tubular and vesicular elements of the early endosomal compartment. Moreover, through the use of small interfering RNA, it has been shown that suppression of PIKfyve induces the formation of swollen endosomal structures that maintain their early and late endosomal identity. Although internalisation, recycling and degradative sorting of receptors for epidermal growth factor and transferrin was unperturbed in PIKfyve suppressed cells, a clear defect in endosome to trans-Golgi-network (TGN) retrograde traffic was observed. These data argue that PIKfyve is predominantly associated with the early endosome, from where it regulates retrograde membrane trafficking to the TGN. It follows that the swollen endosomal phenotype observed in PIKfyve-suppressed cells results primarily from a reduction in retrograde membrane fission rather than a defect in multivesicular body biogenesis

Deformation Clustering Methods for Topologically Optimized Structures under Crash Load based on Displacement Time Series

Multi-objective Topology Optimization has been receiving more and more attention in structural design recently. It attempts to maximize several performance objectives by redistributing the material in a design space for a given set of boundary conditions and constraints, yielding many Paretooptimal solutions. However, the high number of solutions makes it difficult to identify preferred designs. Therefore, an automatic way of summarizing solutions is needed for selecting interesting designs according to certain criteria, such as crashworthiness, deformation, and stress state. One approach for summarization is to cluster similar designs and obtain design representatives based on a suitable metric. For example, with Euclidean distance of the objective functions as the metric, design groups with similar performance can be identified and only the representative designs from different clusters may be analyzed. However, previous research has not dealt with the deformation-related time-series data of structures with different topologies. Since the non-linear dynamic behavior of designs is important in various fields such as vehicular crashworthiness, a clustering method based on time-dependent behavior of structures is proposed here. To compare the time-series displacement data of selected nodes in the structure and to create similarity matrices of those datasets, euclidean metrics and Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) are introduced. This is combined with clustering techniques such as k-medoids and Ordering Points To Identify the Clustering Structure (OPTICS), and we investigate the use of unsupervised learning methods to identify and group similar designs using the time series of nodal displacement data. In the first part, we create simple time-series datasets using a mass-spring system to validate the proposed methods. Each dataset has predefined clusters of data with distinct behavior such as different periods or modes. Then, we demonstrate that the combination of metrics for comparison of time series (Euclidean and DTW) and the clustering method (k-medoids and OPTICS) can identify the clusters of similar behavior accurately. In the second part, we apply these methods to a more realistic, engineering dataset of nodal displacement time series describing the crash behavior of topologically-optimized designs. We identify similar structures and obtain representative designs from each cluster. This reveals that the suggested method is useful in analyzing dynamic crash behavior and supports the designers in selecting representative structures based on deformation data at the early stages of the design process

The clathrin heavy chain isoform CHC22 functions in a novel endosomal sorting step

CHC22 is needed for retrograde trafficking from endosomes to the trans-Golgi, unlike its clathrin sibling CHC17, and in a manner distinct from retromer