Procyclical Monetary Policy and Governance

Weak governance adversely affects firm’s net worth and consequently the value of its collateral. This negative impact on the collateral reduces the external credit available for importing inputs constraining potential output. As a result, a stronger procyclical monetary policy stance is adopted for protecting the exchange rate and hence arresting the degradation in the collateral constraint.Collateral Constraints; Governance; Monetary Policy

Genetic basis of variation for seedling traits in Gossypium hirsutum L.

A 6 × 6 complete diallel analysis was performed to study the inheritance of seedling traits in cotton. Significant differences among genotypes showed the genetic variation and formal analysis predicted the presence of both additive and non-additive genetic variation for inheritance of seedling traits. Further, the estimates of genetic components D, H1 and H2 confirmed the presence of both additive and non-additive genetic effects for all the characteristics. Dominant genes were responsible for theincrease of seedling shoot length, root length, shoot weight and root weight. However, recessive genes were accountable for the increase of shoot root ratio by length and by weight. Seedling shoot length, root length and root weight can be improved through heterosis breeding. The magnitude of broad sense heritability was greater than narrow sense for all the six traits under study hence diminished the scope of selection in the early segregating generation therefore pedigree breeding method is suggested for the improvement of these traits.Key words: Additive dominance model, gene action, Gossypium hirsutum L, heritability, seedling traits

Pass-Through of SBP Policy Rate to Market Interest Rates: An Empirical Investigation

Market based implementation of monetary policy embeds a swift and complete pass-through of changes in policy rate to market interest rates. This impacts the lending and deposit rates (retail rates) of the banking system. Incomplete and slow pass-through impairs the effectiveness of monetary policy transmission mechanism. This study estimates the degree and the speed of interest rate pass-through in case of Pakistan. Monthly data on State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) policy rate, money market rates and banks’ retail lending/deposit rates from July 2001 to August 2011 is used to estimate an unrestricted autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model. The standard ARDL model allows for the estimation of an error correction model, which helps in differentiating short run impact of changes in policy rate from its long run impact on the banks’ lending rates. The results indicate that while there is a swift pass-through from the policy rate (T-bill rates and overnight rate) to money market rate, the impact of changes in money market rates on the bank deposit rates is not only sluggish, but also incomplete. However, banks’ lending rates on fresh loans are more responsive to changes in money market rates as the banks have the luxury to take into account the changes in opportunity cost of funding

Improving the force field description of tyrosine-choline cation-π interactions : QM investigation of phenol-N(Me)₄⁺ interactions

Cation-pi interactions between tyrosine amino acids and compounds containing N,N,N-trimethylethanolammonium (N(CH3)(3)) are involved in the recognition of histone tails by chromodomains and in the recognition of phosphatidylcholine (PC) phospholipids by membrane-binding proteins. Yet, the lack of explicit polarization or charge transfer effects in molecular mechanics force fields raises questions about the reliability of the representation of these interactions in biomolecular simulations. Here, we investigate the nature of phenol tetramethylammonium (TMA) interactions using quantum mechanical (QM) calculations, which we also use to evaluate the accuracy of the additive CHARIVIM36 and Drude polarizable force fields in modeling tyrosine-choline interactions. We show that the potential energy surface (PES) obtained using SAPT2+/aug-cc-pVDZ compares well with the large basis-set CCSD(T) PES when TMA approaches the phenol ring perpendicularly. Furthermore, the SAPT energy decomposition reveals comparable contributions from electrostatics and dispersion in phenol-TMA interactions. We then compared the SAPT2+/augcc-pVDZ PES obtained along various approach directions to the corresponding PES obtained with CHARMM, and we show that the force field accurately reproduces the minimum distances while the interaction energies are underestimated. The use of the Drude polarizable force field significantly improves the interaction energies but decreases the agreement on distances at energy minima. The best agreement between force field and QM PES is obtained by modifying the Lennard-Jones terms for atom pairs involved in the phenol-TMA cation-pi interactions. This is further shown to improve the correlation between the occupancy of tyrosine-choline cation-pi interactions obtained from molecular dynamics simulations of a bilayer-bound bacterial phospholipase and experimental affinity data of the wild-type protein and selected mutants

Procyclical Monetary Policy and Governance

Weak governance adversely affects firm’s net worth and consequently the value of its collateral. This negative impact on the collateral reduces the external credit available for importing inputs constraining potential output. As a result, a stronger procyclical monetary policy stance is adopted for protecting the exchange rate and hence arresting the degradation in the collateral constraint

A small-size macroeconometric model for Pakistan economy

This paper is part of efforts to develop macroeconometric model for Pakistan (MMP). This paper is an initial attempt to develop a small size macroeconometric model to foresee the effects of monetary policy through forecasting and simulations. We present the basic structure of macroeconometric model for Pakistan. This is a small-size model comprising 17 equations, out of which 11 are behavioral equations while the rest are either identities or definitional equations. OLS method is used to estimate the behavioral equations by using annual data from FY73-FY06. We provide the estimation results and results of policy simulations to quantify the impact of shocks to various exogenous variables

A small-size macroeconometric model for Pakistan economy

This paper is part of efforts to develop macroeconometric model for Pakistan (MMP). This paper is an initial attempt to develop a small size macroeconometric model to foresee the effects of monetary policy through forecasting and simulations. We present the basic structure of macroeconometric model for Pakistan. This is a small-size model comprising 17 equations, out of which 11 are behavioral equations while the rest are either identities or definitional equations. OLS method is used to estimate the behavioral equations by using annual data from FY73-FY06. We provide the estimation results and results of policy simulations to quantify the impact of shocks to various exogenous variables

Locked-in Syndrome in a Young Patient Due to SARS-CoV-2: A Case Report

© Copyright © 2020 Sattar, Iqbal, Haider, Zia, Niazi, Hanif, Ali and Khan. Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), apart from commonly involving the respiratory system, has its impact on the central nervous system, with a wide spectrum of clinical presentations ranging from headaches to ischemic strokes. The ongoing research regarding this novel disease has found that there is a very high prevalence of thrombotic episodes especially in critically ill patients when compared to severe presentation of other viral illnesses. This COVID-19-associated coagulopathy has a very complex etiology with the ability to form thrombus in arteries, veins, and microvasculatures of different organs. We present a unique case of a young woman with underlying COVID-19 who unfortunately developed locked-in syndrome due to bilateral pontine infarction during the course of her illness

Pharmaceutical quality control studies on gatifloxacin 200 mg tablets available in the pakistani market

The aim of present work was to compare the quality of different brands of gatifloxacin 200 mg tablets, collected from different retail pharmacies in the local market of Pakistan. Five different brands were characterized by physical and chemical parameters such as, weight variation, hardness, thickness, friability, disintegration, dissolution, uniformity of contents and assay. Among them dissolution either single point or multiple point, including release profile comparison is most important tool for establishing the quality of the product. Brand A was considered as a reference because it passed all physical, chemical, quality control test and it was also brand leader, while brands B, C, D and E were test brands due to their production in local pharmaceutical. Quality control tests were satisfactory and within the limits for all test brands. The aim either biowaiver study of all the brands should conduct or not the similarity and difference among the brands were measured. Results revealed that brand B and D shown the best similarity with brand A and least differential value when we used the model independent f2 factor for similarity and f1 factor for difference. Model dependent methods Zero order, First order, Higuchi release model and Hixson-Crowell method were also used and shown the concentration dependent release of drug, i.e. first order kinetic. The results showed that model-dependent methods were more discriminative than model-independent method. A criterion for selecting the most appropriate model was based on linearity (coefficient of correlation).Colegio de Farmacéuticos de la Provincia de Buenos Aire

T3SEdb: data warehousing of virulence effectors secreted by the bacterial Type III Secretion System

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Effectors of Type III Secretion System (T3SS) play a pivotal role in establishing and maintaining pathogenicity in the host and therefore the identification of these effectors is important in understanding virulence. However, the effectors display high level of sequence diversity, therefore making the identification a difficult process. There is a need to collate and annotate existing effector sequences in public databases to enable systematic analyses of these sequences for development of models for screening and selection of putative novel effectors from bacterial genomes that can be validated by a smaller number of key experiments.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Herein, we present T3SEdb <url>http://effectors.bic.nus.edu.sg/T3SEdb</url>, a specialized database of annotated T3SS effector (T3SE) sequences containing 1089 records from 46 bacterial species compiled from the literature and public protein databases. Procedures have been defined for i) comprehensive annotation of experimental status of effectors, ii) submission and curation review of records by users of the database, and iii) the regular update of T3SEdb existing and new records. Keyword fielded and sequence searches (BLAST, regular expression) are supported for both experimentally verified and hypothetical T3SEs. More than 171 clusters of T3SEs were detected based on sequence identity comparisons (intra-cluster difference up to ~60%). Owing to this high level of sequence diversity of T3SEs, the T3SEdb provides a large number of experimentally known effector sequences with wide species representation for creation of effector predictors. We created a reliable effector prediction tool, integrated into the database, to demonstrate the application of the database for such endeavours.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>T3SEdb is the first specialised database reported for T3SS effectors, enriched with manual annotations that facilitated systematic construction of a reliable prediction model for identification of novel effectors. The T3SEdb represents a platform for inclusion of additional annotations of metadata for future developments of sophisticated effector prediction models for screening and selection of putative novel effectors from bacterial genomes/proteomes that can be validated by a small number of key experiments.</p