The Financing Role of Factoring in China Context

Most enterprises in China face a severe challenge of financing, but have a large amount of receivables at the same time, trapped in a “receivable-payable double high” situation. Traditional factoring is the most advantageous solution in comparison with other policies in terms of management effect, but need to be remodeled to adjust to the particular context of China. The circulation of receivable creditor’s right (CRCR) is an innovative financing mode converting enterprises’ receivables into liquid assets, with pilot projects launched in Hefei and Tianjin City in China. Through CRCR, enterprises’ financing needs can be immediately satisfied by transferring a certificate to any other enterprises for cash. CRCR can also address the debt chain problem prevalent in China and improve the trading efficiency by transferring certificates directly through the supply chain. Going forward, there is a great need to develop pricing mechanism, appraisal system, and safety precaution for this circulation mode. Key words: Factoring; Double high problem; Circulation of receivable creditor’s right (CRCR); Debt chai

Biodiversity of wild alfalfa pollinators and their temporal foraging characters in Hexi Corridor, Northwest China

Seed production of alfalfa (Medicago sativa L.) is important in determining the effective distribution of new cultivars to farmers. However, little is known about the biodiversity and their community function of native wild pollinators of alfalfa in agronomic systems. We investigated the biodiversity of insects which visited alfalfa flowers and their temporal foraging characters in Hexi Corridor, China. A high biodiversity of insect visitors was discovered, 20 insect taxa in all, including 13 species of Hymenoptera, 3 species of Coleoptera, 3 species of Lepidoptera and 1 species of Diptera. Three native bee species, Andrena squamata, Anthophora melanognatha and Megachile abluta,were validated as the principal pollinators. They showed significant variations in tripping mode and their diurnal distribution patterns. Our results indicated that the native wild bees are diverse and they complement each other. This means they have developed a more complex system for the pollination of alfalfa than has been previously found out

Observation of dynamic V-TH of p-GaN Gate HEMTs by fast sweeping characterization

In this work, fast sweeping characterization with an extremely short relaxation time was used to probe the V-TH instability of p-GaN gate HEMTs. As the I-D-V-G sweeping time deceases from 5 ms to 5 mu s, the V-TH dramatically degenerates from 3.13 V to 1.76 V, meanwhile the hysteresis deteriorates from 22.6mV to 1.37 V. Positive bias temperature instability (PBTI) measurement by fast sweeping shows the V-TH features a very fast shifting process but a slower recovering process. D-mode HEMTs counterpart without Mg contamination demonstrates a negligible V-TH shift and hysteresis, proving the V-TH instability is probably due to the ionization of acceptor-like traps in the p-GaN depletion region. Finally, the V-TH instability is verified by a GaN circuit under switching stress. The V-TH instability under different sweeping speed uncovers the fact that the high V-TH by conventionally slow DC measurements is probably artificial. The DC V-TH should be high enough to avoid HEMT faulty turn-on

Genome-wide investigation and functional characterization of the β-ketoadipate pathway in the nitrogen-fixing and root-associated bacterium Pseudomonas stutzeri A1501

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Soil microorganisms are mainly responsible for the complete mineralization of aromatic compounds that usually originate from plant products or environmental pollutants. In many cases, structurally diverse aromatic compounds can be converted to a small number of structurally simpler intermediates, which are metabolized to tricarboxylic acid intermediates via the β-ketoadipate pathway. This strategy provides great metabolic flexibility and contributes to increased adaptation of bacteria to their environment. However, little is known about the evolution and regulation of the β-ketoadipate pathway in root-associated diazotrophs.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>In this report, we performed a genome-wide analysis of the benzoate and 4-hydroxybenzoate catabolic pathways of <it>Pseudomonas stutzeri </it>A1501, with a focus on the functional characterization of the β-ketoadipate pathway. The <it>P. stutzeri </it>A1501 genome contains sets of catabolic genes involved in the peripheral pathways for catabolism of benzoate (<it>ben</it>) and 4-hydroxybenzoate (<it>pob</it>), and in the catechol (<it>cat</it>) and protocatechuate (<it>pca</it>) branches of the β-ketoadipate pathway. A particular feature of the catabolic gene organization in A1501 is the absence of the <it>catR </it>and <it>pcaK </it>genes encoding a LysR family regulator and 4-hydroxybenzoate permease, respectively. Furthermore, the BenR protein functions as a transcriptional activator of the <it>ben </it>operon, while transcription from the <it>catBC </it>promoter can be activated in response to benzoate. Benzoate degradation is subject to carbon catabolite repression induced by glucose and acetate in A1501. The HPLC analysis of intracellular metabolites indicated that low concentrations of 4-hydroxybenzoate significantly enhance the ability of A1501 to degrade benzoate.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The expression of genes encoding proteins involved in the β-ketoadipate pathway is tightly modulated by both pathway-specific and catabolite repression controls in A1501. This strain provides an ideal model system for further study of the evolution and regulation of aromatic catabolic pathways.</p

Circulating Tumor DNA as a Sensitive Marker in Patients Undergoing Irreversible Electroporation for Pancreatic Cancer

Background/Aims: Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is often diagnosed at an advanced stage, resulting in extremely poor 5-year survival. Late diagnosis of PDAC is mainly due to lack of a reliable method of early detection. Carbohydrate antigen (CA) 19-9 is often used as a tumor biomarker in PDAC; however, the test lacks sensitivity and specificity. Therefore, new sensitive and minimally invasive diagnostic tools are required to detect pancreatic cancer. Methods: Here, we investigated circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) which contained KRAS-mutated as a potential diagnostic tool for PDAC patients who underwent irreversible electroporation (IRE). We used droplet digital polymerase chain reaction (ddPCR) to detect the expression of KRAS-mutated genes in plasma samples of 65 PDAC patients who underwent IRE. Results: In these 65 cases, ctDNA was detected in 20 (29.2%) samples. The median overall survival (OS) was 11.4 months with ctDNA+ patients and 14.3 months for ctDNA- patients. ctDNA+ patients had a obviously poorer prognosis associated to overall survival (P &#x3c; 0.001). Conclusion: Our results suggested that the existence of ctDNA was a predictor of survival for PDAC patients. Therefore, ctDNA may be a new sensitive biomarker for monitoring treatment outcome in PDAC

Allogenic Natural Killer Cell Immunotherapy Combined with Irreversible Electroporation for Stage IV Hepatocellular Carcinoma: Survival Outcome

Background/Aims: We evaluated the clinical effectiveness of irreversible electroporation (IRE) in combination with immunotherapy using allogenic natural killer cells (NK) for stage IV hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Methods: The study involved 40 patients with stage IV HCC who were divided equally into two groups: 1) simple IRE; and 2) IRE plus allogenic NK cells (IRE-NK); we mainly assessed the overall survival (OS). Results: The effect of the IRE-NK treatment was synergistic, i.e., not only did it enhance immune function, it also decreased alpha-fetoprotein expression and showed significantly good clinical effectiveness. At the median 7.6-month follow-up (range, 3.8–12.1 months), median OS was higher in the IRE-NK group (10.1 months) than in the IRE group (8.9 months, P = 0.0078). Conclusion: IRE combined with allogeneic NK cell immunotherapy significantly increases the median OS of patients with stage IV HCC

DrM: Mastering Visual Reinforcement Learning through Dormant Ratio Minimization

Visual reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promise in continuous control tasks. Despite its progress, current algorithms are still unsatisfactory in virtually every aspect of the performance such as sample efficiency, asymptotic performance, and their robustness to the choice of random seeds. In this paper, we identify a major shortcoming in existing visual RL methods that is the agents often exhibit sustained inactivity during early training, thereby limiting their ability to explore effectively. Expanding upon this crucial observation, we additionally unveil a significant correlation between the agents' inclination towards motorically inactive exploration and the absence of neuronal activity within their policy networks. To quantify this inactivity, we adopt dormant ratio as a metric to measure inactivity in the RL agent's network. Empirically, we also recognize that the dormant ratio can act as a standalone indicator of an agent's activity level, regardless of the received reward signals. Leveraging the aforementioned insights, we introduce DrM, a method that uses three core mechanisms to guide agents' exploration-exploitation trade-offs by actively minimizing the dormant ratio. Experiments demonstrate that DrM achieves significant improvements in sample efficiency and asymptotic performance with no broken seeds (76 seeds in total) across three continuous control benchmark environments, including DeepMind Control Suite, MetaWorld, and Adroit. Most importantly, DrM is the first model-free algorithm that consistently solves tasks in both the Dog and Manipulator domains from the DeepMind Control Suite as well as three dexterous hand manipulation tasks without demonstrations in Adroit, all based on pixel observations

MicroRNA and transcription factor co-regulatory network analysis reveals miR-19 inhibits CYLD in T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia

T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (T-ALL) is an aggressive hematological malignancy. The understanding of its gene expression regulation and molecular mechanisms still remains elusive. Started from experimentally verified T-ALL-related miRNAs and genes, we obtained 120 feed-forward loops (FFLs) among T-ALL-related genes, miRNAs and TFs through combining target prediction. Afterwards, a T-ALL miRNA and TF co-regulatory network was constructed, and its significance was tested by statistical methods. Four miRNAs in the miR-17–92 cluster and four important genes (CYLD, HOXA9, BCL2L11 and RUNX1) were found as hubs in the network. Particularly, we found that miR-19 was highly expressed in T-ALL patients and cell lines. Ectopic expression of miR-19 represses CYLD expression, while miR-19 inhibitor treatment induces CYLD protein expression and decreases NF-κB expression in the downstream signaling pathway. Thus, miR-19, CYLD and NF-κB form a regulatory FFL, which provides new clues for sustained activation of NF-κB in T-ALL. Taken together, we provided the first miRNA-TF co-regulatory network in T-ALL and proposed a model to demonstrate the roles of miR-19 and CYLD in the T-cell leukemogenesis. This study may provide potential therapeutic targets for T-ALL and shed light on combining bioinformatics with experiments in the research of complex diseases