Evaluating the impact of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) on corruption in Zambia

The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) is internationally recognised as a leading anti-corruption scheme, which promotes transparency, accountability and good governance of public oil, gas, and mining revenues. This article provides the first rigorous quantitative investigation of the impact of EITI on corruption in Zambia. Using a case-comparison approach, called the Synthetic Control Method (SCM), we find that the implementation of EITI provoked a significant decrease in corruption in Zambia (with the corruption-reducing effect of EITI being, though, much stronger at the earlier stages of implementation)

Metagenomics combined with activity-based proteomics point to gut bacterial enzymes that reactivate mycophenolate

Mycophenolate mofetil (MMF) is an important immunosuppressant prodrug prescribed to prevent organ transplant rejection and to treat autoimmune diseases. MMF usage, however, is limited by severe gastrointestinal toxicity that is observed in approximately 45% of MMF recipients. The active form of the drug, mycophenolic acid (MPA), undergoes extensive enterohepatic recirculation by bacterial beta-glucuronidase (GUS) enzymes, which reactivate MPA from mycophenolate glucuronide (MPAG) within the gastrointestinal tract. GUS enzymes demonstrate distinct substrate preferences based on their structural features, and gut microbial GUS enzymes that reactivate MPA have not been identified. Here, we compare the fecal microbiomes of transplant recipients receiving MMF to healthy individuals using shotgun metagenomic sequencing. We find that neither microbial composition nor the presence of specific structural classes of GUS genes are sufficient to explain the differences in MPA reactivation measured between fecal samples from the two cohorts. We next employed a GUS-specific activity-based chemical probe and targeted metaproteomics to identify and quantify the GUS proteins present in the human fecal samples. The identification of specific GUS enzymes was improved by using the metagenomics data collected from the fecal samples. We found that the presence of GUS enzymes that bind the flavin mononucleotide (FMN) is significantly correlated with efficient MPA reactivation. Furthermore, structural analysis identified motifs unique to these FMN-binding GUS enzymes that provide molecular support for their ability to process this drug glucuronide. These results indicate that FMN-binding GUS enzymes may be responsible for reactivation of MPA and could be a driving force behind MPA-induced GI toxicity.Bio-organic Synthesi

Written evidence from Judith Bueno de Mesquita, Dr Claire Lougarre, Lisa Montel and Dr Sharifah Sekalala (COV0195) on The Government’s response to COVID-19: how to further realise the right to health

Providing expertise on international human rights law and public health, the contributors answer question 1 that the Joint Committee asked:Question 1: What steps need to be taken to ensure that measures taken by theGovernment to address the COVID-19 pandemic are human rights compliant?<br/

The impact of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Pandemic on Master graduates’ employability

The COVID-19 pandemic brought the global economy to a near standstill. The scale of the coronavirus and the associated losses have left many countries facing a humanitarian, social and economic crisis. The main objective of the research presented in this article was to determine to what extent the support provided within the activities of the Motokadra project (2018–2020) within the framework of the Operational Programme Knowledge Education Development, funded by the European Social Fund, enabled its participants to adapt to the labour market conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic. The project participants were full-time Master’s students within the faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Silesian University of Technology. They formed the experimental group. The authors examined changes in the employability of the experimental group in the pre-pandemic and post-pandemic periods. The students in the experimental group represented several fields of study, which also allowed the authors to analyse which discipline appeared to be more resilient to the COVID-19 pandemic crisis and whether the profile of the discipline affected employability. The employability of graduates in the automotive industry was particularly examined. The results of the analyses allow us to conclude that the labour market crisis linked to the COVID-19 pandemic negatively affected the experimental group’s employability level. Furthermore, it has been shown that the study of the automation and robotics discipline increases the chances of finding a job after graduation

Using systematic conservation planning to minimize REDD+ conflict with agriculture and logging in the tropics

This article describes the first application of systematic conservation planning for prioritizing REDD+ (reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation) strategies and agricultural expansion. For a REDD+ program in Indonesian Borneo, we find that the most cost-effective way to reduce forest-based emissions by 25% is to better manage protected areas and logging concessions. A more ambitious emissions reduction target would require constraining agricultural expansion and logging, which incurs opportunity costs. We discover, however, that these impacts can be mitigated by relocating oil palm (Elaeis guineensis) agricultural leases to areas that store, on average, 130 tons less carbon per hectare and are 8% more productive for oil palm. This reduces the costs of meeting REDD+ targets, avoids conflict with agriculture, and has the unanticipated effect of minimizing impacts on logging. Our approach presents a transparent and defensible method for prioritizing REDD+ locations and strategies in a way that minimizes development trade-offs and promotes implementation success