Asian Development Bank Trade Finance Survey: Major Findings

Key Points: • A gap in trade finance is represented by unmet demand for lending and guarantees to support $1.6 trillion in trade,$425 billion of which is in developing Asia. • Availability of trade finance impacts economic growth and job creation. • According to the findings of the survey, an increase of 5% in availability of trade finance could result in an increase of 2% in production and 2% more jobs. • Trade finance programs of multilateral development banks help fill trade finance gaps, both globally and in Asian developing economies

Modulation of triglyceride and cholesterol ester synthesis impairs assembly of infectious hepatitis C virus

In hepatitis C virus infection, replication of the viral genome and virion assembly are linked to cellular metabolic processes. In particular, lipid droplets, which store principally triacylglycerides (TAGs) and cholesterol esters (CEs), have been implicated in production of infectious virus. Here, we examine the effect on productive infection of triacsin C and YIC-C8-434, which inhibit synthesis of TAGs and CEs by targeting long-chain acyl-CoA synthetase and acyl-CoA:cholesterol acyltransferase, respectively. Our results present high resolution data on the acylglycerol and cholesterol ester species that were affected by the compounds. Moreover, triacsin C, which blocks both triglyceride and cholesterol ester synthesis, cleared most of the lipid droplets in cells. By contrast, YIC-C8-434, which only abrogates production of cholesterol esters, induced an increase in size of droplets. Although both compounds slightly reduced viral RNA synthesis, they significantly impaired assembly of infectious virions in infected cells. In the case of triacsin C, reduced stability of the viral core protein, which forms the virion nucleocapsid and is targeted to the surface of lipid droplets, correlated with lower virion assembly. In addition, the virus particles that were released from cells had reduced specific infectivity. YIC-C8-434 did not alter the association of core with lipid droplets but appeared to decrease production of infectious virus particles, suggesting a block in virion assembly. Thus, the compounds have antiviral properties, indicating that targeting synthesis of lipids stored in lipid droplets might be an option for therapeutic intervention in treating chronic hepatitis C virus infection

Blind Video Deflickering by Neural Filtering with a Flawed Atlas

Many videos contain flickering artifacts. Common causes of flicker include video processing algorithms, video generation algorithms, and capturing videos under specific situations. Prior work usually requires specific guidance such as the flickering frequency, manual annotations, or extra consistent videos to remove the flicker. In this work, we propose a general flicker removal framework that only receives a single flickering video as input without additional guidance. Since it is blind to a specific flickering type or guidance, we name this "blind deflickering." The core of our approach is utilizing the neural atlas in cooperation with a neural filtering strategy. The neural atlas is a unified representation for all frames in a video that provides temporal consistency guidance but is flawed in many cases. To this end, a neural network is trained to mimic a filter to learn the consistent features (e.g., color, brightness) and avoid introducing the artifacts in the atlas. To validate our method, we construct a dataset that contains diverse real-world flickering videos. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves satisfying deflickering performance and even outperforms baselines that use extra guidance on a public benchmark.Comment: To appear in CVPR2023. Code: github.com/ChenyangLEI/All-In-One-Deflicker Website: chenyanglei.github.io/deflicke

Immunohistochemical analysis of Metadherin in proliferative and cancerous breast tissue

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Metadherin (MTDH) has been reported to be associated with cancer progression in various types of human cancers including breast cancer. Whether MTDH contributes to carcinogenesis of breast cancer is still unknown. In the present study, we investigated the expression of MTDH in normal, UDH (usual ductal hyperplasia), ADH (atypical ductal hyperplasia), DCIS (ductal carcinoma in situ) and invasive cancer to explore the possible role of MTDH for breast cancer carcinogenesis.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Immunohistochemistry was employed on paraffin sections of surgical removed breast samples.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The immunohistochemical results showed almost no staining in normal tissue, moderate staining in ADH and UDH, intense MTDH stains in DCIS and cancer. Statistical analysis demonstrated significant different MTDH expression between proliferative and cancerous breast lesions (<it>p </it>< 0.001). MTDH was positively correlated with the histological differentiation of DCIS (<it>p </it>= 0.028). In breast cancer, statistical analysis revealed a significant correlation between MTDH expression with patients' age (<it>p </it>= 0.042), ER status (<it>p </it>= 0.018) and p53 status (<it>p </it>= 0.001). We also examined the effect of MTDH on cell proliferation in DCIS and cancer, and we found that MTDH overexpression was significantly correlated with high Ki67 index (<it>p </it>= 0.008 and <it>p </it>= 0.036, respectively).</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>MTDH overexpression could be identified in proliferative breast lesions and may contribute to breast cancer progression.</p