Understanding the process of envelope glycoprotein incorporation into virions in simian and feline immunodeficiency viruses

The lentiviral envelope glycoproteins (Env) mediate virus entry by interacting with specific receptors present at the cell surface, thereby determining viral tropism and pathogenesis. Therefore, Env incorporation into the virions formed by assembly of the viral Gag polyprotein at the plasma membrane of the infected cells is a key step in the replication cycle of lentiviruses. Besides being useful models of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infections in humans and valuable tools for developing AIDS therapies and vaccines, simian and feline immunodeficiency viruses (SIV and FIV, respectively) are relevant animal retroviruses; the study of which provides important information on how lentiviral replication strategies have evolved. In this review, we discuss the molecular mechanisms underlying the incorporation of the SIV and FIV Env glycoproteins into viral particles.Fil: Affranchino, Jose Luis. Universidad de Belgrano. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Laboratorio de Virología; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Gonzalez, Silvia Adriana. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad de Belgrano. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Laboratorio de Virología; Argentin

Childhood Absence Epilepsy And Varied Effect On Performance On Attention And Motor Tasks, With Correlation To Eeg And Fmri

Childhood absence epilepsy is characterized by a distinct 3-4 Hz spike and wave discharge seen on EEG that is usually associated with a brief loss of consciousness. It is a general form of epilepsy believed to affect the entire brain. We studied children with childhood absence epilepsy with simultaneous fMRI/EEG while they were doing a behavioral test, either continuous performance task (CPT), or repetitive tapping task (RTT). We were interested in the effect seizures would have on their performance on the CPT and RTT task, an attention and motor task respectively. We found that children would be affected earlier or even before seizure onset during the CPT task, while they would be affected later on in the seizure during the RTT task. There was also worse interictal performance in runs where a seizure was recorded. When correlating this with the imaging we found there to be greater power in the frontal leads of the EEG when a child was unable to perform during a seizure, and there was decreased signal in the frontal lobe with fMRI in similarly impaired performance during seizure. This leads us to believe that the frontal lobes, through corticothalamic networks, are more greatly affected during seizure with increased impairment

Comparison Sites

Web search technologies are fundamental tools to easily navigate through the huge amount of information available in the Internet. One particular type of search technologies are the so- called shopbots, or comparison sites. The emergence of Internet shopbots and their implications for price competition and market efficiency are the focus of this chapter. We develop a simple model where a price comparison site tries to attract (possibly vertically and horizontally differentiated) online retailers on the one hand, and consumers on the other hand. The analysis of the model reveals that differentiation among the products of the retailers as well as their ability to price discriminate between on- and off-comparison-site consumers play a critical role. When products are homogeneous, if online retailers cannot charge different on- and off-the-comparison- site prices, then the comparison site has incentives to charge fees so high that some firms are excluded, which generates price dispersion and an inefficient outcome. By contrast, when on- and off-comparison-site prices can be different, the comparison site attracts all the players to the platform and the allocation is efficient. A similar result obtains when products are horizontally differentiated. In that case, the comparison site becomes an aggregator of product information and no matter whether firms can price discriminate or not, the comparison site attracts all the players to the platform and an efficient outcome ensues. We argue that the lack of vertical product differentiation may also be critical for this efficiency result. In fact, we show that when quality differences are large, the comparison site may find it profitable to charge fees such that low quality producers are excluded, thereby inducing an inefficient outcome.

An Example of Procompetitive Trade Policies

The procompetitive effects of trade policies are analyzed in a foreign duopoly model of vertical product differentiation. A uniform tariff policy complying with the Most Favored Nation (MFN) clause is welfare superior to free trade because of a pure rent-extracting effect. A nonuniform tariff policy yields an even higher level of social welfare because of procompetitive effects. The optimalpolicyissensitivetofirms’ cost asymmetries: if these are high, imports of low quality are subsidized and imports of high quality face a tariff; otherwise, both imports face a tariff. Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) are examples of such nonuniform tariff policies. They yield higher welfare than free trade because they are procompetitive; moreover, a RTA with a lowquality producing country yields larger gains than a RTA with a high-quality producing country because the former enables the importer to extract foreign rents.endogenous quality, hedonic prices, procompetitive policies, regional trade agreements

Pollinator attractiveness of five weeds

The number of pollinators in agro-ecosystems world wide has declined alarminglyin recent decades due to poora gricultural practices such as the intensive use of pesticides and monocultures.Postprint (published version

A Proposal For The Securitization Of SMEs Receivables And/Or Cash Flows By Combined Financing

The expression credit is the name of the game is becoming more relevant as financing credit sales is increasingly becoming a challenge for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Mexico. The securitization of receivables, also called monetization, helps to address the challenges of obtaining cash to finance new receivables. SMEs have to be able to offer credit and the securitizations allow them to do this by using the receivables they already have to obtain more cash to help them finance new sales.This paper presents the literature that supports this proposition, as well as a model that allows for the restructuring of revolving and non-revolving financing tools for SMEs. The proposed model enables multiple SMEs to combine their receivables into one master trust and use their collective receivables as collateral for loans.During an exhaustive literature review, theories and isolated arguments were found that support this proposal. The proposal intends to generate an all-round win-win scheme through which 1) the SMEs can obtain financing at a reasonable cost, 2) the investors can gain the opportunity to diversify their portfolios, and 3) the Mexican government can gain the opportunity to channel support to productive initiatives in the country.On a theoretical level, the results of the proposed solution could make an innovative contribution to the cognitive area of structured finance. Further, the possibility of combining the securitizations of many different SMEs to finance new receivables with their actual receivables could be valuable for the development of companies on a practical level

A Patient-Specific Approach for Breast Cancer Detection and Tumor Localization Using Infrared Imaging

Breast cancer (BC) is the most common cancer among women in the United States; approximately one out of every 24 women die of related causes. BC screening is a critical factor for improving patient prognosis and survival rate. Infrared (IR) thermography is an accurate, inexpensive and operator independent modality that is not affected by tissue density as it captures surface temperature variations induced by the presence of tumors. A novel patient-specific approach for IR imaging and simulation is proposed. In this work, multi-view IR images of isolated breasts are obtained in the prone position (face down), which allows access to the entire breast surface because the breasts hang freely. The challenge of accurately determining size and location of tumors within the breasts is addressed through numerical simulations of a patient-specific digital breast model. The digital breast models for individual patients are created from clinical images of the breast, such as IR imaging, digital photographs or magnetic resonance images. The numerical simulations of the digital breast model are conducted using ANSYS Fluent, where computed temperature images are generated in the same corresponding views as clinical IRI images. The computed and clinical IRI images are aligned and compared to measure their match. The determination of tumor size and location was conducted through the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm, which iteratively minimized the mean squared error. The methodology was tested on the breasts of seven patients with biopsy-proven breast cancer with tumor diameters ranging from 8 mm to 27 mm. The method successfully predicted the equivalent tumor diameter within 2 mm and the location was predicted within 6.3 mm in all cases. The time required for the estimation is 48 minutes using a 10-core, 3.41 GHz workstation. The method presented is accurate, fast and has potential to be used as an adjunct modality to mammography in BC screening, especially for dense breasts

Non-EU International Students in UK Higher Education Institutions: Prosperity, Stagnation and Institutional Hierarchies

This thesis investigates the relationship between the distribution of non-European Union (EU) international students across the UK higher education sector and the characteristics of UK higher education institutions (HEIs) and the strategies they may pursue to make their provision more attractive to non-European Union (EU) international students. It looks at how this relationship has evolved since 1995/96, analysing the recruitment patterns of individual HEIs in relation to policy changes that may impact the number of students coming to UK higher education from outside the EU. To do so, I analyse an exceptionally large dataset, produced by UK’s Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA), containing information on over 35 million higher education students covering a 22-year period. This study represents the first systematic longitudinal analysis of recruitment patterns of non-EU international students in UK HEIs for the past two decades. My analysis shows that UK institutional hierarchies play a pivotal in explaining the uneven distribution of non-EU internationals students across HEIs, particularly in policy environments that seek to restrict mobility. Understanding this unevenness is critical considering the terms in which non-EU international students are recruited in UK higher education. This subset of students represents a substantial resource –both financial and symbolic– in the sector, as they tend to pay higher fees than their domestic counterparts and are perceived as a marker of institutional prestige, as attested in some global league tables. Thus, the observed inequalities between institutions in terms of their shares of students who are non-EU international –with more prestigious HEIs overwhelmingly having higher shares– contribute to longstanding resource and prestige disparities in UK higher education. Moreover, this thesis investigates whether the position of universities within UK institutional hierarchies allows us to understand the strategies HEIs pursue to make their provision more attractive to non-EU international students. Drawing from the Bourdieusian concept of ‘field of power’ (1993) and its development by Marginson (2008), I argue that the position of a given 8 university in a hierarchy will shape their ‘space of possibles’ (Bourdieu 1993: 30; Marginson 2008: 307), that is the strategies that they may follow to successfully recruit non-EU international students. Previous research suggests that universities that recruit non-EU international students as a result of marketising their educational offering to a global audience, pitch their products to particularly lucrative markets, which results in certain institutions having particularly high concentrations of certain nationalities in certain subjects (Findlay et al. 2017). However, as I show in this thesis, the extent to which HEIs engage in these practices vary depending on their position in UK’s institutional hierarchy