Statistical Analysis of Transposon Sequencing Data to Determine Essential Genes

Transposon Sequencing (TnSeq) has become a popular biological tool for assessing the phenotypes of large libraries of bacterial mutants at the same time. This allows for high-throughput identification of genes which are essential for growth, thus providing valuable information about the function of those genes and the discovery of potential drug targets that could lead to treatments. However, analysis of data obtained from TnSeq is challenging as it requires estimating unknown parameters from data that is often noisy and likely coming from a mixture of different phenotypes. In addition, the classification of essentiality is not known a priori, requiring unsupervised methods capable of identifying key features in the data to confidently determine essentiality. We present several models capable of identifying essential genes while overcoming the difficulties that are present in analyzing TnSeq data. Together, these methods provide ways to analyze TnSeq data in one or multiple conditions, confined within gene boundaries or across the entire genome, and while reducing the impact of noise and outliers that are often present in this type of data

The Dollar as World Money

Marx's theory of money can provide insights into the entrenchment of the U. S. dollar as a modern-day equivalent of world money. The domestic underpinnings of global monetary standards determined the inflationary bias of the Bretton Woods system and the systemic deflationary tendencies of the subsequent non-system. There is a strong connection between the tendency toward systemic illiquidity, characteristic of financialized capitalism, which has to be periodically cured by an expansion of government debt, and the institutionalization of the international dollar standard, under which the monetary liabilities of the U. S. state serve as the preeminent form of “world money.” The remarkable resilience of the international dollar standard is rooted in its ability to support the present system of globalized production, characterized by a specific division of labor between the financialized U. S.–centered core and an export-oriented periphery