Testing the Rational Expectations Hypothesis on the Retail Trade Sector Using Survey Data from Malaysia

The rational expectations hypothesis states that when people are expecting things to happen, using the available information, the predicted outcomes usually occur. This study utilized survey data provided by the Business Expectations Survey of Limited Companies to test whether forecasts of the Malaysian retail sector, based on gross revenue and capital expenditures, are rational. The empirical evidence illustrates that the decision-makers expectations in the retail sector are biased and too optimistic in forecasting gross revenue and capital expenditures.REH, Unbiasedness, Non-serial Correlation, Weak-form Efficiency

Engineering multiple levels of specificity in an RNA viral vector

Synthetic molecular circuits could provide powerful therapeutic capabilities, but delivering them to specific cell types and controlling them remains challenging. An ideal "smart" viral delivery system would enable controlled release of viral vectors from "sender" cells, conditional entry into target cells based on cell-surface proteins, conditional replication specifically in target cells based on their intracellular protein content, and an evolutionarily robust system that allows viral elimination with drugs. Here, combining diverse technologies and components, including pseudotyping, engineered bridge proteins, degrons, and proteases, we demonstrate each of these control modes in a model system based on the rabies virus. This work shows how viral and protein engineering can enable delivery systems with multiple levels of control to maximize therapeutic specificity

No.02: AN URBAN PERSPECTIVE ON FOOD SECURITY IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH

■ Food insecurity challenges in the Global South are changing as a result of rapid urbanization and the globalization of food supply chains. ■ Urban food insecurity is not distinct from rural food security challenges and policy seeking to address either should adopt a systems approach that strengthens their interdependence. There is an opportunity to increase the effectiveness of rural food security programming while concurrently addressing the growing food security needs of vulnerable urban populations. ■ This brief recommends that food security policy should prioritize intra-urban stages of informal food value chains and increase the efficiency and effectiveness of their supply to urban consumers. By supporting urban wholesale infrastructure development and providing technical assistance in intra-urban food transportation, programming can enhance the competitiveness of domestic food product distribution within cities while increasing rural farmers’ access to urban consumers

Programmable protein circuits in living cells

Synthetic protein-level circuits could enable engineering of powerful new cellular behaviors. Rational protein circuit design would be facilitated by a composable protein-protein regulation system in which individual protein components can regulate one another to create a variety of different circuit architectures. In this study, we show that engineered viral proteases can function as composable protein components, which can together implement a broad variety of circuit-level functions in mammalian cells. In this system, termed CHOMP (circuits of hacked orthogonal modular proteases), input proteases dock with and cleave target proteases to inhibit their function. These components can be connected to generate regulatory cascades, binary logic gates, and dynamic analog signal-processing functions. To demonstrate the utility of this system, we rationally designed a circuit that induces cell death in response to upstream activators of the Ras oncogene. Because CHOMP circuits can perform complex functions yet be encoded as single transcripts and delivered without genomic integration, they offer a scalable platform to facilitate protein circuit engineering for biotechnological applications

Engineering multiple levels of specificity in an RNA viral vector

Synthetic molecular circuits could provide powerful therapeutic capabilities, but delivering them to specific cell types and controlling them remains challenging. An ideal "smart" viral delivery system would enable controlled release of viral vectors from "sender" cells, conditional entry into target cells based on cell-surface proteins, conditional replication specifically in target cells based on their intracellular protein content, and an evolutionarily robust system that allows viral elimination with drugs. Here, combining diverse technologies and components, including pseudotyping, engineered bridge proteins, degrons, and proteases, we demonstrate each of these control modes in a model system based on the rabies virus. This work shows how viral and protein engineering can enable delivery systems with multiple levels of control to maximize therapeutic specificity