Identification Of Lead-Sensitive Expression And Splicing Quantitative Trait Loci In Drosophila Melanogaster By Analysis Of Rna-Seq Data

Lead exposure has long been one of the most important topics in global public health since it is a potent developmental neurotoxin. Here, we conducted an expression QTL (eQTLs) analysis, which is genome-wide association analysis of genetic variants with differential gene expression, in the male heads of 79 Drosophila melanogaster recombinant inbred lines originally from eight parental strains in the presence or absence of developmental exposure to 250 µM lead acetate. The aim was to study the effects of lead exposure on gene expression and identify the lead-responsive genes. After detecting 1,536 cis-eQTLs and 952 trans-eQTLs (1000 permutation threshold at 0.05), we focused our analysis on lead-sensitive “trans-eQTL hotspots,” defined as genomic regions that are associated with a cluster of genes in a lead-dependent manner. We noticed that the genes associated with one of the 13 detected trans-eQTL hotspots, Chr2L: 6,250,000 could be roughly divided into two groups based on their differential expression profile patterns and different categories of function. We visualized the expression of all the associated genes in the trans-eQTL hotspot with hierarchical clustering. Besides the overall expression profile patterns, the heat maps displayed the segregation of differential parental genetic contributions. This suggested that trans-regulatory regions with different genetic contributions from the parental lines have significantly different expression changes after lead exposure. We believe that the lead-responsive trans-eQTL hotspots generated in this study could improve our understanding of genetic dissection of transcript abundance and provide insights into the mechanisms of how environmental toxins affect transcriptional pathways. In a follow-up study, we also found lead-responsive sQTLs. The identification of lead-responsive sQTLs provides further evidence that different parental genomic contribution can cause significantly differential isoform usage after developmental lead exposure. Great achievements have been made in understanding how trans-sQTL hotspots alter the susceptibility to lead exposure, opening up a gate towards the mechanisms of trans-sQTL hotspots, as well as the neurotoxicity of lead

Developing economies and the emergence of new stakeholder group: an examination of stakeholders in the Chinese stock market

As a consequence of the development of the Chinese economy, there has been an emergence of “new” stakeholder groups for the Chinese listed firms. New stakeholder groups include creditors, regulatory agencies, private investors, professional associations and environmentalists. With the use of secondary data, a review was undertaken to explore the emergence of these new stakeholder groups and discuss their influence over listed firms in China. The stakeholder typology developed by Mitchell et al (1997) is used to identify stakeholder attributes of each stakeholder group and assess their stakeholder power. The changes of stakeholder power over the years mirror China’s transition from a centrally planned economy to a more market oriented one

Cultural impact on Chinese corporate disclosure-a corporate governance perspective

Purpose &ndash; The purpose of this preliminary study is to explore the impact of changed cultural environment on the voluntary disclosure behaviour of Chinese listed companies.Design/methodology/approach &ndash; A theoretical framework of the relationship between corporate disclosure and governance forms the basis of the research. A composite checklist of corporate disclosure was developed using relevant corporate governance indices and analyses were carried out on the 2003 financial reports of 120 Chinese listed companies. Six areas of voluntary disclosure of the sample companies were analysed and reported. These areas are: board structure and functioning, employees related issues, director remuneration, audit committee, related party transactions and stakeholder interest.Findings &ndash; The results suggest that as China\u27s cultural and social norms change, there was willingness of Chinese listed companies to provide voluntary information in addition to the disclosure requirements. Information relating to stakeholder interest and employees issues are found more frequently disclosed by listed companies than those which were regarded as sensitive. This is an exploratory study which shows that further research may provide more concrete evidence of the changing corporate disclosure environment in China.Research limitations/implications &ndash; This study based on one year\u27s results and as such has limitation in the interpretation of the results. Further research is necessary to demonstrate the impact of culture in corporate disclosure.Practical implications &ndash; The results have practical implications for professional accountants and auditors to understand further the trend of voluntary disclosure in China. The paper provides some evidence of the changing scene of Chinese corporate governance practice.Originality/value &ndash; This study fulfils a gap in prior research by examining the effect of cultural implications in corporate governance, in an emerging economy. The composite voluntary disclosure checklist will serve a good basis of measurement in corporate disclosure.<br /

A Gap Analysis on Generation Y Customer Expectations and Perceptions towards Lifestyle Hotels

This study conducts a gap analysis on Generation Y (Gen Y) customer expectation and perception towards lifestyle hotels. In the result, 11 gaps between Gen Y customer expectation and perceptions on lifestyle hotels are identified. An Importance-Performance (I-P) map further demonstrates how lifestyle hotels satisfy Gen Y clients, and suggests future improvements for lifestyle hotels to better cater Gen Y guests. The findings indicate that Gen Yers are overall satisfied with lifestyle hotels, and lifestyle hotels have relatively high performance in general. But there are also a few aspects lifestyle hotels could enhance for higher customer satisfactions. This research not only enriches limited existing understandings on Gen Y customer expectations, perceptions, and lifestyle hotel performance as well for academies; but also gives industry professionals useful recommendations for future improvements

A Dynamic View of the Relationship between Software Development Outsourcing Propensity and Industry Environment

Despite the progress scholars have made on the relationship between IT outsourcing (ITO) and industry environment, our knowledge of this link is still ambiguous and limited. Drawing on recent research on the evolvement of ITO market, we extend our understanding by taking a dynamic view of this issue. Specifically, we focus on software development outsourcing (SDO) and three key elements of industry environment, namely resource munificence, industry concentration and technology change. We argue that the evolvement of ITO market has a moderating effect onthe relationship between SDO propensity and industry environment. Using industry-level data for U.S. private industries from 1998 to 2015, we find that industry environment’s impact on SDO propensity does change with the evolvement of the ITO market. Our findings provide insights on the relationship between SDO propensity and industry environment andindicate the importance of a dynamic view for understanding ITO-related phenomena

Probing Triple-W Production and Anomalous WWWW Coupling at the CERN LHC and future 100TeV proton-proton collider

Triple gauge boson production at the LHC can be used to test the robustness of the Standard Model and provide useful information for VBF di-boson scattering measurement. Especially, any derivations from SM prediction will indicate possible new physics. In this paper we present a detailed Monte Carlo study on measuring WWW production in pure leptonic and semileptonic decays, and probing anomalous quartic gauge WWWW couplings at the CERN LHC and future hadron collider, with parton shower and detector simulation effects taken into account. Apart from cut-based method, multivariate boosted decision tree method has been exploited for possible improvement. For the leptonic decay channel, our results show that at the sqrt{s}=8(14)[100] TeV pp collider with integrated luminosity of 20(100)[3000] fb-1, one can reach a significance of 0.4(1.2)[10]sigma to observe the SM WWW production. For the semileptonic decay channel, one can have 0.5(2)[14]sigma to observe the SM WWW production. We also give constraints on relevant Dim-8 anomalous WWWW coupling parameters.Comment: Accepted version by JHE

A study of voluntary disclosure of listed Chinese firms - a stakeholder perspective

Purpose &ndash; The aim of this paper is to investigate stakeholder power changes and their impact on firms\u27 disclosure decisions in the Chinese stock market. Using legitimacy theory and stakeholder theory, the paper identifies newly emerged stakeholder groups for listed Chinese firms during three distinguished periods of the development of the Chinese stock market.Design/methodology/approach &ndash; Panel data analysis was undertaken over a period from 1995-2006 with an aim to examine the influence of stakeholder power changes on voluntary disclosures made by 297 listed firms in their 12 years of annual reports. A voluntary disclosure checklist has been used for hand-collecting data from annual reports.Findings &ndash; The finding shows that different stakeholder groups exert different degrees of influence on firms\u27 decision-making in respect of information disclosure during different stages of the development of the Chinese stock market.Research limitations/implications &ndash; The impact of a stakeholder power changes on corporate disclosure has not been well addressed and how listed Chinese firms respond to these changes is still a significant gap in the Chinese corporate disclosure literature. In this study, the paper uses proxies to represent each stakeholder group, discuss power changes of each group and predict the impact of power changes on firms\u27 voluntary disclosure.Originality/value &ndash; The paper identifies the new content of the &ldquo;social contract&rdquo; between listed firms and Chinese society and identifies various stakeholder groups of listed Chinese firms in the context of a new &ldquo;social contract&rdquo;. The paper predicts that voluntary corporate disclosure is the result of stakeholder pressures and firms use voluntary disclosure as one of their strategies to manage the firm-stakeholder relationship.<br /