Stiffness of primordial germ cells is required for their extravasation in avian embryos

細胞の血行性転移の新たな仕組みを発見 --世界初、新たながん転移抑止戦略の開発にも期待--. 京都大学プレスリリース. 2022-12-13.Unlike mammals, primordial germ cells (PGCs) in avian early embryos exploit blood circulation to translocate to the somatic gonadal primordium, but how circulating PGCs undergo extravasation remains elusive. We demonstrate with single-cell level live-imaging analyses that the PGCs are arrested at a specific site in the capillary plexus, which is predominantly governed by occlusion at a narrow path in the vasculature. The occlusion is enabled by a heightened stiffness of the PGCs mediated by actin polymerization. Following the occlusion, PGCs reset their stiffness to soften in order to squeeze through the endothelial lining as they transmigrate. Our discovery also provides a model for the understanding of metastasizing cancer extravasation occurring mainly by occlusion

Analysis of the Role of Tariff Concessions in East Asia

While there are many studies focusing on the impacts of various trade policy agreements across the world in the recent years, there is not much focus in the literature on the extent to which these agreements are implemented later, in terms of the aspects agreed upon therein. In this paper, we firstly identify the past achievements of the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) in East Asian regions in terms of tariff removals and suggest future rooms for further economic benefits from trade liberalization in the region. Secondly, we provide the tariff concession dataset in the GTAP Data Base, which distinguishes the tariff removals agreed in these EPAs in East Asia but not implemented yet, from the existing overall tariffs in the benchmark year. As the standard GTAP Data Base only incorporates enforced tariff reductions through the base year applied tariffs, to analyse future trade integration, it might be worth it to integer commitments that are not yet implemented. We do that at the HS6 levels for East Asian EPAs that allows us to compare the economic impacts of partial versus complete implementation of the trade liberalization agreed in East Asian EPAs. Our results suggest that taking those commitments into account economically matters and that such satellite dataset might be taken as actual baseline for future policy simulations.JEL Classification Codes: D58, F13, F14, F15, F17The earlier version of this study was presented at the 18th Annual Conference on Global Economic Analysis on 17-19 June, 2015 in Melbourne

Mice with Calr mutations homologous to human CALR mutations only exhibit mild thrombocytosis

Shide, K., Kameda, T., Kamiunten, A. et al. Mice with Calr mutations homologous to human CALR mutations only exhibit mild thrombocytosis. Blood Cancer J. 9, 42 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41408-019-0202-

East Asia tariff concession: A CGE analysis

While there are many studies focusing on the impacts of various trade policy agreements across the world in the recent years, there is not much focus in the literature on the extent to which these agreements are implemented later, in terms of the aspects agreed upon therein. In this paper, we identify the past achievements of the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) in the East Asian regions in terms of tariff removals and suggest future rooms for further economic benefits from trade liberalization in the region. Secondly, we provide the tariff concession dataset in the GTAP database, which distinguishes the tariff removals agreed in these EPAs in East Asia but not implemented yet, from the existing overall tariffs in the benchmark year. The standard GTAP Data Base incorporates all tariff reductions that have been included in the agreements that are in force; however not all of them are implemented in reality. We have quantified the actual tariff removals in the East Asia EPAs at HS6 levels. These will be aggregated to GTAP sectoral level, to arrive at a GTAP-consistent tariff dataset that contains actually implemented tariffs in East Asia. This is suggested to be taken as the actual baseline for policy simulations in the future. Based on this dataset, we compare the economic impacts of partial versus complete implementation of the trade liberalization agreed in the East Asia EPAs. This is accomplished in two steps: firstly, we prepare simulations (using the Altertax tool, documented in Malcolm (1998), GTAP Technical Paper No: 12) to switch from the GTAP tariffs to the levels implied by our new tariff dataset; secondly, we evaluate the impacts of reducing the tariffs from the modified levels to those included in the standard GTAP Data Base. The second step gives the difference between completely implementing all tariff reductions included in the agreements and partial implementation that has been done in reality...