Loan and bond finance in Argentina, 1985-2005

Loan and bond finance during 1985-2005 can be divided into three sub-periods. After the 1982 debt crisis, which mainly involved domestic and foreign bank loans to both the corporate and government sectors, there was practically no credit. This situation of lack of credit persisted until the domestic economy was stabilized in 1991 with the Convertibility Plan, and foreign debt renegotiation was completed in 1993 with the Brady Plan. Loan finance recovered to unprecedented levels since the 1950s, and bond finance became for the first time an important financing vehicle for both the national government and large firms in the corporate sector. Credit came to a sudden stop in 2001, with widespread default on both corporate and government bonds. The 2001 debt crisis was not followed by runaway domestic inflation, and by 2005 Argentina was able to return to foreign capital markets.bank loans, sovereign bonds, provincial bonds, central bank bonds, corporate bonds, pension funds, yields, liquidity

Vegetable protein isolates

This chapter discusses the importance of vegetable proteins as functional ingredients in food formulations. It provides an overview of the main chemical components, world production, history and food applications of the main vegetable protein sources (legumes, cereals, oilseeds, roots and green leaves), with special emphasis on soybean, pea, and wheat. The chapter includes a description of the composition and structure of the main protein fractions, and a general approach to protein extraction, purification and processing technology to prepare protein meals, concentrates and isolates. In addition, the technologically important functional properties of vegetable protein preparations are described. Finally, nutritional and health effects, as well as the regulatory status of vegetable protein products are examined.Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation.Peer reviewe

Loan and bond finance in Argentina, 1985-2005

Loan and bond finance during 1985-2005 can be divided into three sub-periods. After the 1982 debt crisis, which mainly involved domestic and foreign bank loans to both the corporate and government sectors, there was practically no credit. This situation of lack of credit persisted until the domestic economy was stabilized in 1991 with the Convertibility Plan, and foreign debt renegotiation was completed in 1993 with the Brady Plan. Loan finance recovered to unprecedented levels since the 1950s, and bond finance became for the first time an important financing vehicle for both the national government and large firms in the corporate sector. Credit came to a sudden stop in 2001, with widespread default on both corporate and government bonds. The 2001 debt crisis was not followed by runaway domestic inflation, and by 2005 Argentina was able to return to foreign capital markets

Cooperativity in binding processes: New insights from phenomenological modeling

Cooperative binding is one of the most interesting and not fully understood phenomena involved in control and regulation of biological processes. Here we analyze the simplest phenomenological model that can account for cooperativity (i.e. ligand binding to a macromolecule with two binding sites) by generating equilibrium binding isotherms from deterministically simulated binding time courses. We show that the Hill coefficients determined for cooperative binding, provide a good measure of the Gibbs free energy of interaction among binding sites, and that their values are independent of the free energy of association for empty sites. We also conclude that although negative cooperativity and different classes of binding sites cannot be distinguished at equilibrium, they can be kinetically differentiated. This feature highlights the usefulness of pre-equilibrium time-resolved strategies to explore binding models as a key complement of equilibrium experiments. Furthermore, our analysis shows that under conditions of strong negative cooperativity, the existence of some binding sites can be overlooked, and experiments at very high ligand concentrations can be a valuable tool to unmask such sites.Instituto de Física de Líquidos y Sistemas BiológicosFacultad de Ciencias Exacta

Comparative validation of three contemporary bleeding risk scores in acute coronary syndromes

Background: Hemorrhagic complications are strongly linked with subsequent adverse outcomes in acute coronary syndrome (ACS) patients. Various risk scores (RS) are available to estimate the bleeding risk in these patients. Aims: To compare the predictive accuracy of the three contemporary bleeding RS in ACS. Methods: We studied 4500 consecutive patients with ACS. For each patient, the ACTION, CRUSADE, and Mehran et al bleeding RS were calculated. We assessed their performance either for the prediction of their own major bleeding events or to predict the TIMI serious (major and minor) bleeding episodes in the overall population, in patients with non-ST elevation ACS (NSTEACS) and in those with ST-elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) patients. Calibration (Hosmer-Lemeshow test) and discrimination (c-statistic) for the three RS were computed and compared. We used the concept of net reclassification improvement (NRI) to compare the incremental prognostic value of using a particular RS over the remaining scores in predicting the TIMI serious bleeding. Results: The best predictive accuracy was obtained by the CRUSADE score either for the prediction of its own major bleeding events (c-statistic=0.80, 0.791, and 0.81 for the entire sample, for STEMI, and for NSTEACS patients, respectively) or to predict the TIMI serious bleed occurrence (c-statistic=0.741, 0.738,and 0.745 for the whole population, for STEMI and NSTEACS patients, respectively). The lowest bleeding rates observed in patients classified as low risk corresponded to the CRUSADE RS. All scores performed modestly in patients who did not undergo coronariography (all c-statistic <0.70). The CRUSADE score was significantly superior to the ACTION model in predicting the TIMI serious bleeding occurrence in terms of NRI overall and by ACS subgroups (p<0.05). Overall, the CRUSADE RS exhibited better calibration for predicting the TIMI serious bleeding compared to the ACTION and Mehran et al scores (Hosmer-Lemeshow p-values of 0.26, 0.13, and 0.07, respectively). Conclusion: The CRUSADE score represents, among the more contemporary bleeding RS, the most accurate and reliable quantitative clinical tool in STEACS and STEMI patients. We encourage the utilization of the CRUSADE index for bleeding risk stratification purposes in daily clinical practice and in ACS outcome studies. The performance of the three more contemporary bleeding RS is modest in those patients who received conservative management

Phylovar: toward scalable phylogeny-aware inference of single-nucleotide variations from single-cell DNA sequencing data

Motivation: Single-nucleotide variants (SNVs) are the most common variations in the human genome. Recently developed methods for SNV detection from single-cell DNA sequencing data, such as SCI and scVILP, leverage the evolutionary history of the cells to overcome the technical errors associated with single-cell sequencing protocols. Despite being accurate, these methods are not scalable to the extensive genomic breadth of single-cell whole-genome (scWGS) and whole-exome sequencing (scWES) data. Results: Here, we report on a new scalable method, Phylovar, which extends the phylogeny-guided variant calling approach to sequencing datasets containing millions of loci. Through benchmarking on simulated datasets under different settings, we show that, Phylovar outperforms SCI in terms of running time while being more accurate than Monovar (which is not phylogeny-aware) in terms of SNV detection. Furthermore, we applied Phylovar to two real biological datasets: an scWES triple-negative breast cancer data consisting of 32 cells and 3375 loci as well as an scWGS data of neuron cells from a normal human brain containing 16 cells and approximately 2.5 million loci. For the cancer data, Phylovar detected somatic SNVs with high or moderate functional impact that were also supported by bulk sequencing dataset and for the neuron dataset, Phylovar identified 5745 SNVs with non-synonymous effects some of which were associated with neurodegenerative diseases. Availability and implementation: Phylovar is implemented in Python and is publicly available at https://github.com/NakhlehLab/Phylovar.National Science Foundation | Ref. IIS-1812822National Science Foundation | Ref. IIS-210683

Singlet oxygen triggers chloroplast rupture and cell death in the zeaxanthin epoxidase defective mutant aba1 of Arabidopsis thaliana under high light stress

[EN] The two Arabidopsis thaliana mutants, aba1 and max4, were previously identified as sharing a number of coregulated genes with both the flu mutant and Arabidopsis cell suspension cultures exposed to high light (HL). On this basis, we investigated whether aba1 and max4 were generating high amounts of singlet oxygen (1O2) and activating 1O2-mediated cell death. Thylakoids of aba1 produced twice as much 1O2 as thylakoids of max4 and wild type (WT) plants when illuminated with strong red light. 1O2 was measured using the spin probe 2,2,6,6-tetramethyl-4-piperidone hydrochloride. 77-K chlorophyll fluorescence emission spectra of thylakoids revealed lower aggregation of the light harvesting complex II in aba1. This was rationalized as a loss of connectivity between photosystem II (PSII) units and as the main cause for the high yield of 1O2 generation in aba1. Upregulation of the 1O2 responsive gene AAA-ATPase was only observed with statistical significant in aba1 under HL. Two early jasmonate (JA)-responsive genes, JAZ1 and JAZ5, encoding for two repressor proteins involved in the negative feedback regulation of JA signalling, were not up-regulated to the WT plant levels. Chloroplast aggregation followed by chloroplast rupture and eventual cell death was observed by confocal imaging of the fluorescence emission of leaf cells of transgenic aba1 plants expressing the chimeric fusion protein SSU-GFP. Cell death was not associated with direct 1O2 cytotoxicity in aba1, but rather with a delayed stress response. In contrast, max4 did not show evidence of 1O2-mediated cell death. In conclusion, aba1 may serve as an alternative model to other 1O2-overproducing mutants of Arabidopsis for investigating 1O2-mediated cell death

Cooperativity in binding processes: New insights from phenomenological modeling

Cooperative binding is one of the most interesting and not fully understood phenomena involved in control and regulation of biological processes. Here we analyze the simplest phenomenological model that can account for cooperativity (i.e. ligand binding to a macromolecule with two binding sites) by generating equilibrium binding isotherms from deterministically simulated binding time courses. We show that the Hill coefficients determined for cooperative binding, provide a good measure of the Gibbs free energy of interaction among binding sites, and that their values are independent of the free energy of association for empty sites. We also conclude that although negative cooperativity and different classes of binding sites cannot be distinguished at equilibrium, they can be kinetically differentiated. This feature highlights the usefulness of pre-equilibrium time-resolved strategies to explore binding models as a key complement of equilibrium experiments. Furthermore, our analysis shows that under conditions of strong negative cooperativity, the existence of some binding sites can be overlooked, and experiments at very high ligand concentrations can be a valuable tool to unmask such sites.Instituto de Física de Líquidos y Sistemas BiológicosFacultad de Ciencias Exacta

Morfología y citogenética de nemátodos Rhabditida parasitando arañas y escorpiones en Argentina

The discovery of nematodes in spiders and scorpions from a manual sampling in the city of La Plata, Argentina, revealed the presence of specimens of the order Rhabditda. The main objective of this study is to present the presence of nematodes in the arachnid group, for which there is little precedent. One of the nematodes found belongs to the genus Rhabditis Dujardin, 1845, of saprophytic character, characterized by carrying a fungus that kills the host and degrades it in order to feed itself. This was found in the general cavity of the body of the spider Dysdera crocata Koch, 1838. It is characterized by having a thin cuticle, closed labial papillae, a long stoma without teeth, an esophagus with a middle bulb with a valve and a valved basal bulb, and a middle vulva, short and conical caudal appendage. Mitotic division is described and information about the morphology of chromosomes is provided. We carried out a cytogenetic study of the Rhabditis, they showed that they have five chromosomes, of which 2 are larger, in metaphase they are acro-telocentric. The other genus found is Cruznema (Artigas, 1927) Dougherty, 1953, parasite of the intestine of the scorpion Tityus carrilloi Ojanguren-Affilastro, Kochalka, Guerrero-Orellana, Garcete-Barrett, De Roodt, Borges &amp; Ceccarelli, 2021, characterized by having a cuticle with longitudinal striae and transverse rings, mouth surrounded by six well-separated lips, cuticularized stoma, long and with three well-developed teeth, esophagus with a strong and muscular middle bulb and a valved basal bulb, female with a prodelphic ovary, vulva posterior to the half the length of the body, caudal appendage short and conical.El hallazgo de nematodos en arañas y escorpiones, fruto de habituales y sistemáticos de muestreos manuales de arácnidos en la ciudad de La Plata, Argentina, reveló la presencia de ejemplares del orden Rhabditda. Este estudio tiene como objetivo comunicar la presencia de nematodos en el grupo arácnidos, del cual hay escasos y limitados antecedentes.&nbsp; Uno de los nematodos hallados pertenece al género Rhabditis Dujardin, 1845, de carácter saprófito, caracterizado por llevar en el esófago un hongo que al matar al hospedador lo degrada para poder alimentarse. Este se halló en la cavidad general del cuerpo de la araña Dysdera crocata Koch, 1838. El mismo se caracteriza por tener la cutícula fina, papilas labiales cerradas, estoma largo, sin dientes, esófago con bulbo medio con valva y bulbo basal valvado, vulva media, apéndice caudal corto y cónico. Se describe la división mitótica y se aporta información acerca de la morfología de los cromosomas. Se realizó un estudio citogenético de los Rhabditis, los mismos mostraron poseer cinco cromosomas, de los cuales 2 son más grandes, en metafase, son acro-telocéntricos. El otro género hallado es Cruznema (Artigas, 1927) Dougherty, 1953, parásito del intestino del escorpión Tityus carrilloi Ojanguren-Affilastro, Kochalka, Guerrero-Orellana, Garcete-Barrett, De Roodt, Borges &amp; Ceccarelli, 2021, caracterizado por tener una cutícula con estrías longitudinales y anillos transversales, boca rodeada de seis&nbsp; labios bien separados, estoma cuticularizado, largo y con tres dientes bien desarrollado, esófago con un bulbo medio fuerte y musculoso y un bulbo basal valvado, hembra con un ovario prodélfico, vulva posterior a la mitad de la longitud del cuerpo, apéndice caudal corto y cónico