An Analysis of Management Buy-out Failure in Recession

The UK buy-out market went down in the last quarter of 2008 with a significant reduction of deal numbers and deal values. Besides, the exit market has been difficult through 2008 with no buy-out IPOs but large proportion of receiverships. Therefore buy-out failure attracts interest and it would be worthwhile to identify factors that leads to or predicts a failure, particularly in a recessional condition. This study is built on previous studies of Wright et al. (1996) and Wilson et al. (2009) which estimated buy-out failure in recessions of 1990s and 2008 respectively. A logit model is applied in the paper but did not show significant results. Nevertheless, the significant and positive sign of interest cover indicates the impact of leverage and profitability on the probability of failure

Acute Tachycardia Increases Aortic Distensibility, but Reduces Total Arterial Compliance Up to a Moderate Heart Rate

Background: The differential effects of rapid cardiac pacing on small and large vessels have not been well-established. The objective of this study was to investigate the effect of pacing-induced acute tachycardia on hemodynamics and arterial stiffness.Methods: The pressure and flow waves in ascending aorta and femoral artery of six domestic swine were recorded simultaneously at baseline and heart rates (HR) of 135 and 155 beats per minutes (bpm) and analyzed by the models of Windkessel and Womersley types. Accordingly, the flow waves were simultaneously measured at carotid and femoral arteries to quantify aortic pulse wave velocity (PWV). The arterial distensibility was identified in small branches of coronary, carotid and femoral arteries with diameters of 300–600 μm by ex vivo experiments.Results: The rapid pacing in HR up to 135 bpm reduced the total arterial compliance, stroke volume, systemic pulse pressure, and central systolic pressure by 36 ± 17, 38 ± 26, 29 ± 16, and 23 ± 12%, respectively, despite no statistical difference of mean aortic pressure, cardiac output, peripheral resistance, and vascular flow patterns. The pacing also resulted in a decrease of distensibility of small muscular arteries, but an increase of aortic distensibility. Pacing from 135 to 155 bpm had negligible effects on systemic and local hemodynamics and arterial stiffness.Conclusions: There is an acute mismatch in the response of aorta and small arteries to pacing from basal HR to 135 bpm, which may have important pathological implications under chronic tachycardia conditions

The one-dimensional polymer poly[[aqua­(2,2′-bipyridine)cadmium(II)]-μ-trans-stilbene-4,4′-dicarboxyl­ato]

In the title polymer, [Cd(C16H10O4)(C10H8N2)(H2O)]n, the CdII ion is in a strongly distorted octa­hedral geometry, being coordinated by two N atoms from a 2,2′-bipyridine ligand, three carboxylate O atoms from two symmetry-related trans-stilbene-4,4′-dicarboxyl­ate dianions and one water mol­ecule. The stilbene ligand lies on an inversion centre at the midpoint of the central C=C bond. This feature generates the polymeric structure: adjacent CdII ions are bridged by trans-stilbene-4,4′-dicarboxyl­ate dianions, giving rise to a one-dimensional structure. The coordinated water mol­ecule is involved in interchain O—H⋯O hydrogen bonds

RefSelect: a reference sequence selection algorithm for planted (l, d) motif search

Background The planted (l, d) motif search (PMS) is an important yet challenging problem in computational biology. Pattern-driven PMS algorithms usually use k out of t input sequences as reference sequences to generate candidate motifs, and they can find all the (l, d) motifs in the input sequences. However, most of them simply take the first k sequences in the input as reference sequences without elaborate selection processes, and thus they may exhibit sharp fluctuations in running time, especially for large alphabets. Results In this paper, we build the reference sequence selection problem and propose a method named RefSelect to quickly solve it by evaluating the number of candidate motifs for the reference sequences. RefSelect can bring a practical time improvement of the state-of-the-art pattern-driven PMS algorithms. Experimental results show that RefSelect (1) makes the tested algorithms solve the PMS problem steadily in an efficient way, (2) particularly, makes them achieve a speedup of up to about 100× on the protein data, and (3) is also suitable for large data sets which contain hundreds or more sequences. Conclusions The proposed algorithm RefSelect can be used to solve the problem that many pattern-driven PMS algorithms present execution time instability. RefSelect requires a small amount of storage space and is capable of selecting reference sequences efficiently and effectively. Also, the parallel version of RefSelect is provided for handling large data sets

Metabolomic and transcriptomic profiling reveals the effect of dietary protein and lipid levels on growth performance in loach (Paramisgurnus dabryanus)

The subject of this study was to explore the optimum requirements of loach (Paramisgurnus dabryanus) regarding dietary proteins and lipids and discuss the underlying mechanism. We designed nine diets to determine the effects of different levels of dietary crude protein (CP: 30%, 35%, and 40%) and ether extract (EE: 6%, 10%, and 14%) on the growth performance and metabolism of P. dabryanus. In total, 2160 healthy P. dabryanus (5.19 ± 0.01 g) were divided into nine groups with four replications at 60 fish per barrel stocking density. The trial lasted for eight weeks. Serum and liver samples were gathered for metabolomic and transcriptomic analyses. The results showed that the specific growth rate of P. dabryanus in the CP40EE10 group was the fastest and notably higher than that in other groups (P< 0.05). Analysis of the metabolome results found that the mTOR signaling pathway, glycerophospholipid metabolism, D-arginine and D-ornithine metabolism were significantly enriched pathways in the CP40EE10 group compared with the other groups (P< 0.05). Moreover, the transcriptomic analysis of differentially expressed genes (DEGs) showed that the expression of ARG (arginase) involved in protein synthesis was significantly upregulated in the CP40EE10 group compared to the slowest growing group (P< 0.05). Additionally, the expression of SPLA2 (secretory phospholipase A2) involved in lipid metabolism and FBP (fructose-1,6-bisphosphatase) involved in glucose metabolism were all significantly downregulated in the CP30EE6 group compared with the CP40EE10 group (P< 0.05). Furthermore, the analysis of differentially expressed metabolites (DEMs) and DEGs co-enriched in the KEGG pathway revealed that the significantly enriched pathways were arginine and proline metabolism, glycerophospholipid metabolism, and glycolysis/gluconeogenesis in CP40EE10 compared with other groups (P< 0.05). We conclude that including 40% CP and 10% EE in the P. dabryanus diet could result in a better growth rate. We hypothesized from metabolomic and transcriptomic analyses that the CP40EE10 diet might promote the growth of P. dabryanus by promoting protein synthesis, lipid metabolism, and energy production