Transmission of World Prices to the Domestic Market in Vietnam

During the past two decades Vietnam has witnessed increasing engagement with the world market, achieved through entry into numerous international trading agreements, altered border policies, institutional reforms, and relaxation of controls on foreign investment. These endeavors have been repaid with rapid GDP growth, expanding trade, and increasing foreign investment. High rates of inflation have also accompanied the development process at times, especially in recent years after Vietnam joined the WTO. This study explored how these two macroeconomic phenomena -- increasing world market integration and inflation -- impact domestic prices. Specifically, the degree to which the world price changes are transmitted into the domestic market and the level of sectoral inflation pass-through are investigated. Model specifications include the most basic form which only contains world price as the independent variable, level regression models with world price and inflation as independent variables, and error correction models with and without an inflation term. Three alternative model specifications were estimated to test for the effects of home goods, wages, and trade policy interventions on world price transmission. With price and tariff data from General Statistics Office of Vietnam (2009), inflation and real exchange rate data from IMF (2010), and wage data from the Economist (2010), models were estimated at three levels of sectoral aggregation for the period from 1999 to 2008

Transmission of World Prices to the Domestic Market in Vietnam

During the past two decades Vietnam has witnessed increasing engagement with the world market, achieved through entry into numerous international trading agreements, altered border policies, institutional reforms, and relaxation of controls on foreign investment. These endeavors have been repaid with rapid GDP growth, expanding trade, and increasing foreign investment. High rates of inflation have also accompanied the development process at times, especially in recent years after Vietnam joined the WTO. This study explored how these two macroeconomic phenomena -- increasing world market integration and inflation -- impact domestic prices. Specifically, the degree to which the world price changes are transmitted into the domestic market and the level of sectoral inflation pass-through are investigated. Model specifications include the most basic form which only contains world price as the independent variable, level regression models with world price and inflation as independent variables, and error correction models with and without an inflation term. Three alternative model specifications were estimated to test for the effects of home goods, wages, and trade policy interventions on world price transmission. With price and tariff data from General Statistics Office of Vietnam (2009), inflation and real exchange rate data from IMF (2010), and wage data from the Economist (2010), models were estimated at three levels of sectoral aggregation for the period from 1999 to 2008

DODO: an efficient orthologous genes assignment tool based on domain architectures. Domain based ortholog detection

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Orthologs are genes derived from the same ancestor gene loci after speciation events. Orthologous proteins usually have similar sequences and perform comparable biological functions. Therefore, ortholog identification is useful in annotations of newly sequenced genomes. With rapidly increasing number of sequenced genomes, constructing or updating ortholog relationship between all genomes requires lots of effort and computation time. In addition, elucidating ortholog relationships between distantly related genomes is challenging because of the lower sequence similarity. Therefore, an efficient ortholog detection method that can deal with large number of distantly related genomes is desired.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>An efficient ortholog detection pipeline DODO (DOmain based Detection of Orthologs) is created on the basis of domain architectures in this study. Supported by domain composition, which usually directly related with protein function, DODO could facilitate orthologs detection across distantly related genomes. DODO works in two main steps. Starting from domain information, it first assigns protein groups according to their domain architectures and further identifies orthologs within those groups with much reduced complexity. Here DODO is shown to detect orthologs between two genomes in considerably shorter period of time than traditional methods of reciprocal best hits and it is more significant when analyzed a large number of genomes. The output results of DODO are highly comparable with other known ortholog databases.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>DODO provides a new efficient pipeline for detection of orthologs in a large number of genomes. In addition, a database established with DODO is also easier to maintain and could be updated relatively effortlessly. The pipeline of DODO could be downloaded from <url>http://140.109.42.19:16080/dodo_web/home.htm</url></p

Vitamin D receptor ChIP-seq in primary CD4+ cells: relationship to serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels and autoimmune disease

PMCID: PMC3710212This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited

2D-Qsar for 450 types of amino acid induction peptides with a novel substructure pair descriptor having wider scope

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Quantitative structure-activity relationships (QSAR) analysis of peptides is helpful for designing various types of drugs such as kinase inhibitor or antigen. Capturing various properties of peptides is essential for analyzing two-dimensional QSAR. A descriptor of peptides is an important element for capturing properties. The atom pair holographic (APH) code is designed for the description of peptides and it represents peptides as the combination of thirty-six types of key atoms and their intermediate binding between two key atoms.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The substructure pair descriptor (SPAD) represents peptides as the combination of forty-nine types of key substructures and the sequence of amino acid residues between two substructures. The size of the key substructures is larger and the length of the sequence is longer than traditional descriptors. Similarity searches on C5a inhibitor data set and kinase inhibitor data set showed that order of inhibitors become three times higher by representing peptides with SPAD, respectively. Comparing scope of each descriptor shows that SPAD captures different properties from APH.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>QSAR/QSPR for peptides is helpful for designing various types of drugs such as kinase inhibitor and antigen. SPAD is a novel and powerful descriptor for various types of peptides. Accuracy of QSAR/QSPR becomes higher by describing peptides with SPAD.</p

Exploiting inflammation for therapeutic gain in pancreatic cancer

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is an aggressive malignancy associated with &#60;5% 5-year survival, in which standard chemotherapeutics have limited benefit. The disease is associated with significant intra- and peritumoral inflammation and failure of protective immunosurveillance. Indeed, inflammatory signals are implicated in both tumour initiation and tumour progression. The major pathways regulating PDAC-associated inflammation are now being explored. Activation of leukocytes, and upregulation of cytokine and chemokine signalling pathways, both have been shown to modulate PDAC progression. Therefore, targeting inflammatory pathways may be of benefit as part of a multi-target approach to PDAC therapy. This review explores the pathways known to modulate inflammation at different stages of tumour development, drawing conclusions on their potential as therapeutic targets in PDAC

Judgments of learning and improvement

Can learners accurately judge the rate of their learning? Rates of learning may be informative when study time is allocated across materials, and students' judgments of their learning rate have been proposed as a possible metacognitive tool. Participants estimated how much they improved between presentations in multitrial learning situations in which n-gram paragraphs (in Experiments 1 and 2) or word pairs (Experiments 3 and 4) were learned . In the first experiment, participants rated improvement on a percentage scale, whereas on the second and third, judgments were given on a 0–6 scale. Experiment 4 used both a percentage scale and an absolute number scale. The main result was that judgments of improvement were poorly correlated with actual improvement and, in one case, were negatively correlated. Although judgments of improvement were correlated with changes in judgments of learning, they were not reliable indicators of actual improvement. Implications are discussed for theoretical work on metacognition

Display of probability densities for data from a continuous distribution

Based on cumulative distribution functions, Fourier series expansion and Kolmogorov tests, we present a simple method to display probability densities for data drawn from a continuous distribution. It is often more efficient than using histograms.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, presented at Computer Simulation Studies XXIV, Athens, GA, 201

Specificity of the E. coli LysR-Type Transcriptional Regulators

Families of paralogous oligomeric proteins are common in biology. How the specificity of assembly evolves is a fundamental question of biology. The LysR-Type Transcriptional Regulators (LTTR) form perhaps the largest family of transcriptional regulators in bacteria. Because genomes often encode many LTTR family members, it is assumed that many distinct homooligomers are formed simultaneously in the same cell without interfering with each other's activities, suggesting specificity in the interactions. However, this assumption has not been systematically tested.A negative-dominant assay with λcI repressor fusions was used to evaluate the assembly of the LTTRs in E. coli K-12. Thioredoxin (Trx)-LTTR fusions were used to challenge the homooligomeric interactions of λcI-LTTR fusions. Eight cI-LTTR fusions were challenged with twenty-eight Trx fusions. LTTRs could be divided into three classes based on their interactions with other LTTRs.Multimerization of LTTRs in E. coli K-12 is mostly specific. However, under the conditions of the assay, many LTTRs interact with more than one noncognate partner. The physiological significance and physical basis for these interactions are not known