Potential for Development and Limitations of Regional Business Environment

The article considers some questions of institutional support for the development of the regional business environment. In connection with constantly growing social liabilities of regional and municipal authorities, which results in the upsurge of risks of budget imbalance at respective levels, the research provides a foundation to the necessity of forming favorable business environment promoting enterprise activity in regions. The process of creating institutes of a region’s business environment is analyzed with applying a matrix institutional model of entrepreneurship. The article reveals the mechanism stipulating the emergence of specific peculiarities of institutional configurations of the regional business environment. A conclusion is drawn about the decisive role of the institutional configuration of the business environment in the existing differences in the levels of social and economic development of regions. The researchers put forward a hypothesis that supporting a favorable institutional configuration of a region’s business environment that stimulates enterprise activity in the area cannot last indefinitely as its development is of a cyclical nature. Simulation parameters for the formation and maintenance of a favorable institutional configuration of the business environment are given. With the aim of practical application of the suggested approach, the authors suggest a methodology allowing for regional authorities to estimate the expediency of favorable institutional configuration of business environment, and on this basis to formulate rules of play for business so that these rules could boost business activity and increase the contribution of entrepreneurship to the region’s social and economic development. The approach under consideration provides an opportunity to substantiate a theoretical and methodological framework for developing practical mechanisms of projecting and further long-term maintenance of favorable institutional configuration of business environment which will contribute to expanding the region’s business activity, and which is resistant to negative effects of the external environment.Work produced with the financial support of the grant FSBI “Russian Humanitarian Science Foundation” in the framework of scientific — research project “Interaction of authority and business organizations in the municipalities: through compromise to mutual loyalty» № 15-12-02008

Vortex-chain phases in layered superconductors

Layered superconductors in tilted magnetic field have a very rich spectrum of vortex lattice configurations. In the presence of in-plane magnetic field, a small c-axis field penetrates in the form of isolated vortex chains. The structure of a single chain is mainly determined by the ratio of the London [$\lambda$] and Josephson [$\lambda_{J}$] lengths, $\alpha= \lambda/\lambda_{J}$. At large $\alpha$ the chain is composed of tilted vortices [tilted chains] and at small $\alpha$ it consists of a crossing array of Josephson vortices and pancake stacks [crossing chains]. We studied the chain structures at intermediate $\alpha$'s and found two types of behavior. (I) In the range $0.4 < \alpha < 0.5$ a c-axis field first penetrates in the form of pancake-stack chains located on Josephson vortices. Due to attractive coupling between deformed stacks, their density jumps from zero to a finite value. With further increase of the c-axis field the chain structure smoothly evolves into modulated tilted vortices and then transforms via a second-order phase transition, into the tilted straight vortices. (II) In the range $0.5 < \alpha < 0.65$ a c-axis field first penetrates in the form of kinks creating kinked tilted vortices. With increasing the c-axis field this structure is replaced via a first-order phase transition by the strongly deformed crossing chain. This transition is accompanied by a large jump of pancake density. Further evolution of the chain structure is similar to the higher anisotropy scenario: it smoothly transforms back into the tilted straight vortices.Comment: Accepted to Phys. Rev. B, 20 pages 12 figures, animation of chain structure is available in http://mti.msd.anl.gov/movies/Chains/Nl8al06Im.gif (gif, 441 KB

Experimental study of the thermal stability of materials in high temperature oxygen-containing media

An experimental study is made of the interaction of several materials with a high temperature medium containing oxygen. The temperature of the surface was measured as a function of time. It is found that the higher the velocity of mass removal from the surface, the more effective is the material from the viewpoint of heat resistance

Lidar observations of atmospheric optical characteristics during Sichuan earthquake

The results of lidar observations of the atmosphere during the Sichuan (China) earthquake of 2008 are presented. It is shown that atmospheric parameters substantially changed during and after the earthquake. The profile of scattering characteristics formed in the lower troposphere differs from the original, which can serve as a predictor for earthquakes

Estimates of statistical significance for comparison of individual positions in multiple sequence alignments

BACKGROUND: Profile-based analysis of multiple sequence alignments (MSA) allows for accurate comparison of protein families. Here, we address the problems of detecting statistically confident dissimilarities between (1) MSA position and a set of predicted residue frequencies, and (2) between two MSA positions. These problems are important for (i) evaluation and optimization of methods predicting residue occurrence at protein positions; (ii) detection of potentially misaligned regions in automatically produced alignments and their further refinement; and (iii) detection of sites that determine functional or structural specificity in two related families. RESULTS: For problems (1) and (2), we propose analytical estimates of P-value and apply them to the detection of significant positional dissimilarities in various experimental situations. (a) We compare structure-based predictions of residue propensities at a protein position to the actual residue frequencies in the MSA of homologs. (b) We evaluate our method by the ability to detect erroneous position matches produced by an automatic sequence aligner. (c) We compare MSA positions that correspond to residues aligned by automatic structure aligners. (d) We compare MSA positions that are aligned by high-quality manual superposition of structures. Detected dissimilarities reveal shortcomings of the automatic methods for residue frequency prediction and alignment construction. For the high-quality structural alignments, the dissimilarities suggest sites of potential functional or structural importance. CONCLUSION: The proposed computational method is of significant potential value for the analysis of protein families

Exploring dynamics of protein structure determination and homology-based prediction to estimate the number of superfamilies and folds

BACKGROUND: As tertiary structure is currently available only for a fraction of known protein families, it is important to assess what parts of sequence space have been structurally characterized. We consider protein domains whose structure can be predicted by sequence similarity to proteins with solved structure and address the following questions. Do these domains represent an unbiased random sample of all sequence families? Do targets solved by structural genomic initiatives (SGI) provide such a sample? What are approximate total numbers of structure-based superfamilies and folds among soluble globular domains? RESULTS: To make these assessments, we combine two approaches: (i) sequence analysis and homology-based structure prediction for proteins from complete genomes; and (ii) monitoring dynamics of the assigned structure set in time, with the accumulation of experimentally solved structures. In the Clusters of Orthologous Groups (COG) database, we map the growing population of structurally characterized domain families onto the network of sequence-based connections between domains. This mapping reveals a systematic bias suggesting that target families for structure determination tend to be located in highly populated areas of sequence space. In contrast, the subset of domains whose structure is initially inferred by SGI is similar to a random sample from the whole population. To accommodate for the observed bias, we propose a new non-parametric approach to the estimation of the total numbers of structural superfamilies and folds, which does not rely on a specific model of the sampling process. Based on dynamics of robust distribution-based parameters in the growing set of structure predictions, we estimate the total numbers of superfamilies and folds among soluble globular proteins in the COG database. CONCLUSION: The set of currently solved protein structures allows for structure prediction in approximately a third of sequence-based domain families. The choice of targets for structure determination is biased towards domains with many sequence-based homologs. The growing SGI output in the future should further contribute to the reduction of this bias. The total number of structural superfamilies and folds in the COG database are estimated as ~4000 and ~1700. These numbers are respectively four and three times higher than the numbers of superfamilies and folds that can currently be assigned to COG proteins

Influence of Administrative Regulation on the Efficiency of Business Activities in the Region

The article discusses the theoretical issues of the formation of the administrative regulation mechanisms for business entities. The necessity of the further development of theoretical and methodological base and the application tools for the design of business environment is proved. This can stimulate the growth of business and investment activity in the Russian regions and municipalities. The authors identify two types of government structures influence on the business entities, differentiated by the nature of the targeting impact on the economic activity of business structures—the administrative pressure and administrative assistance. It is suggested that in practice, high cost implications for compliance with all regulation requirements as well as sanctions for the violation of these requirements create preconditions for the development of informal interaction between entrepreneurs and the representatives of regulatory bodies. Therefore, businessmen try to minimize the costs associated with the implementation of formal administrative requirements, rules and regulations by personal arrangements. A mathematical model for the assessment of the informal interaction between business entities and certain officials of control supervisory authorities is proposed. It allows to determine the range of benefits for economic entities from avoiding the implementation of administrative norms, requirements and rules. It is concluded that unreasonably high level of costs for the implementation of formal administrative requirements rules and regulations by business entities composes the economic basis for the reproduction of informal relations. This determines mutual benefits for a number of entrepreneurs and a part of bureaucracy from various schemes of informal interaction.The article has been prepared with the support of the Grant of the Russian Foundation for Humanities in the framework of the research and development project " Development of a favourable institutional configuration of the regional business environment as the factor to increase the competitiveness of business entities" No. 16–12–02007

A tale of two ferredoxins: sequence similarity and structural differences

BACKGROUND: Sequence similarity between proteins is usually considered a reliable indicator of homology. Pyruvate-ferredoxin oxidoreductase and quinol-fumarate reductase contain ferredoxin domains that bind [Fe-S] clusters and are involved in electron transport. Profile-based methods for sequence comparison, such as PSI-BLAST and HMMer, suggest statistically significant similarity between these domains. RESULTS: The sequence similarity between these ferredoxin domains resides in the area of the [Fe-S] cluster-binding sites. Although overall folds of these ferredoxins bear no obvious similarity, the regions of sequence similarity display a remarkable local structural similarity. These short regions with pronounced sequence motifs are incorporated in completely different structural environments. In pyruvate-ferredoxin oxidoreductase (bacterial ferredoxin), the hydrophobic core of the domain is completed by two β-hairpins, whereas in quinol-fumarate reductase (α-helical ferredoxin), the cluster-binding motifs are part of a larger all-α-helical globin-like fold core. CONCLUSION: Functionally meaningful sequence similarity may sometimes be reflected only in local structural similarity, but not in global fold similarity. If detected and used naively, such similarities may lead to incorrect fold predictions

Program for experimental investigations of the mechanisms for the emission of coherent radiation by relativistic electrons with energies of 10-500 MeV in oriented crystals

A program of experimental investigations of the mechanisms for the emission of coherent radiation by electrons in periodic structures is proposed. The program is aimed at developing sources of energy-tunable quasimonochromatic x radiation and y radiationyesBelgorod State Universit