Innovation in Asian Philanthropy: Entrepreneurial Social Finance in Asia

This publication is the second in a series of ACSEP working papers concerned with what is termed 'entrepreneurial social finance' in Asia, which explores how philanthropy is responding to the financial and nonfinancial needs of the region's social entrepreneurs. The term philanthropy is most commonly associated with straightforward grant making, most usually making donations where all capital is lost and no return expected. In modern practice, philanthropy is more sophisticated and diverse than this, wanting to utilise as many tools as possible with the goal of creating sustained social change. Recognising this, philanthropy is defined in this study, as the deployment of financial and human capital for primarily social impact. For this reason, this paper investigates the growing interest in 'impact investing,' which seeks to use non-grant finance to maximise the social and financial outcomes by investing in social businesses. This study employs an essentially qualitative methodology. The researchers conducted 40 face-to-face and telephone interviews in Singapore, India, China, Japan, the Philippines and Thailand between March and November 2012. In-depth interviews were chosen as the central component of the study to gain insight into the personal motivations of lead individuals who had founded or who are managing philanthropy organisations

Cloning and Expression of a Perilla frutescens Cytochrome P450 Enzyme Catalyzing the Hydroxylation of Phenylpropenes

Phenylpropanoid volatile components in plants are useful and valuable not only as flavorings, but also as medicines and food supplements. The pharmacological actions and toxicities of these compounds have been well studied but their synthetic pathways are generally unclear. In this study, we mined expressed sequence tag libraries of pure strains of perilla maintained for over 30 years for their oil type and conducted gas chromatography-mass spectrometry analyses of the perilla oils to confirm the presence of monohydrates speculated to be intermediates of the phenylpropene synthetics pathways. These putative monohydrate intermediates and their regioisomers were synthesized to identify the reaction products of assays of heterologously expressed enzymes. An enzyme involved in the synthesis of a phenylpropanoid volatile component was identified in perilla. Expression of this enzyme in Saccharomyces cerevisiae showed that it is a member of the cytochrome P450 family and catalyzes the introduction of a hydroxy group onto myristicin to form an intermediate of dillapiole. The enzyme had high sequence similarity to a CYP71D family enzyme, high regiospecificity, and low substrate specificity. This study may aid the elucidation of generally unexploited biosynthetic pathways of phenylpropanoid volatile components

A1F-B, a novel CCAAT-binding transcription activator that interacts with the aldolase B promoter

AbstractWe describe here a 70 kDa transcription factor A1F-B, which preferentially binds to an element encompassing a CCAAT motif on the rat aldolase B promoter. Comparison of binding specificities, relative molecular masses, and subunit compositions with those of other known CCAAT-binding factors indicated that A1F-B is a novel member of CCAAT-binding factors

A Japanese text dictation system based on phoneme recognition and a dependency grammar

PROCEEDINGS OF IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ACOUSTICS, SPEECH, AND SIGNAL PROCESSIN

Characterization of genetically modified mice for phosphoglycerate mutase, a vitally-essential enzyme in glycolysis

Models de ratolí; Glucòlisi; Diabetis mellitusModelos de ratón; Glucólisis; Diabetes mellitusMouse models; Glycolysis; Diabetes mellitusGlycolytic metabolism is closely involved in physiological homeostasis and pathophysiological states. Among glycolytic enzymes, phosphoglycerate mutase (PGAM) has been reported to exert certain physiological role in vitro, whereas its impact on glucose metabolism in vivo remains unclear. Here, we report the characterization of Pgam1 knockout mice. We observed that homozygous knockout mice of Pgam1 were embryonic lethal. Although we previously reported that both PGAM-1 and -2 affect global glycolytic profile of cancers in vitro, in vivo glucose parameters were less affected both in the heterozygous knockout of Pgam1 and in Pgam2 transgenic mice. Thus, the impact of PGAM on in vivo glucose metabolism is rather complex than expected before.This work was supported in part by grants from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (Grants No. 26310103 to HK and No. 15K19283 to HK), and by the Japan Agency for Medical Research and Development (AMED), Core Research for Evolutional Science and Technology (CREST JP17gm0610002h0306 to HK). HK; Hiroshi Kondoh

Non-perturbative non-integrability of non-homogeneous nonlinear lattices induced by non-resonance hypothesis

We prove the non-integrability (non-existence of additional analytic conserved quantities other than Hamiltonian) for Fermi-Pasta-Ulam (FPU) lattices by virtue of Lyapunov-Kovalevskaya- -Ziglin-Yoshida's monodromy method about the variational equations. The key to this analysis is that the normal variational equations along a certain solution happen to be in a type of Lam\'e equations. We also introduce the classification problem towards non-homogeneous nonlinear lattices including FPU lattices using non-integrability preserving transformation.Comment: Latex, 21 pages, to appear in Physica D (1996), ps.Z file available at http://www.bip.riken.go.jp/irl/chaosken/reulam.ps.