"Dark Matter: Some Reflections on the Current Account Debate"

The United States has a large and persistent current account deficit. Yet, U.S.'s income receipts from the rest of the world have exceeded its income payments to the rest of the world for many years. This appears to be paradoxical because for a country with a negative net foreign assets position, such as the U.S., international income payments to the rest of the world are likely to exceed its international income receipts. Hausmann and Sturzenegger (2005) offer an explanation of this apparent paradox. They argue that U.S. current account statistics do not properly measure U.S.'s net foreign assets position and that its actual net foreign assets position is measurably better than the officially estimated position primarily due to the existence of intangible corporate capital invested overseas. In their view the debate about the sustainability of the U.S. current account deficit and the negative net foreign assets position is moot because these deficits and debts are either non-existent or fairly small. This paper critically evaluates Hausmann et al's claims and examines the implications of their hypothesis. It offers, within an analytical framework, alternative explanations that are more consistent with the stylized facts.

Regulatory Change and the Quality of Compliance to Mandatory Disclosure Requirements: Evidence from Bangladesh

The present study investigates the effectiveness of changes in the regulatory environment on the quality of compliance to mandatory disclosure requirements in Bangladesh. Statistical analysis of the Mandatory Disclosure Index, as developed in this paper using annual reports of the exchangelisted firms before and after the changes in the regulatory environment, shows a significant improvement in the quality of compliance during the more regulated time period. The size of the firm, the qualification of its accounting staff that prepares financial statements and the reputation of its auditing firm have significant positive impact on the quality of compliance. The analysis presented in the study point to two additional important findings: lack of profitability of the firm does not seem to affect the quality of its compliance, and the performance of domestic firms are at par with foreign affiliated firms as far as the quality of the compliance is concerned. The findings reported in the present study lend support to the conventional notion that well packaged and timed regulations can foster sustainable development in the overall reporting environment of a country

Watertight and 2-Manifold Surface Meshes Using Dual Contouring With Tetrahedral Decomposition of Grid Cubes

The Dual Contouring algorithm (DC) is a grid-based process used to generate surface meshes from volumetric data. The advantage of DC is that it can reproduce sharp features by inserting vertices anywhere inside the grid cube, as opposed to the Marching Cubes (MC) algorithm that can insert vertices only on the grid edges. However, DC is unable to guarantee 2-manifold and watertight meshes due to the fact that it produces only one vertex for each grid cube. We present a modified Dual Contouring algorithm that is capable of overcoming this limitation. Our method decomposes an ambiguous grid cube into a maximum of twelve tetrahedral cells; we introduce novel polygon generation rules that produce 2-manifold and watertight surface meshes. We have applied our proposed method on realistic data, and a comparison of the results of our proposed method with results from traditional DC shows the effectiveness of our method

Climate Data Empathy

In the era of climate services, which provide globally complete data products in a ready-to-use form, the context of climate data is in danger of being neglected or forgotten. However, the historical and present-day context imprinted on this climate data is important in its own right. The data depend on political, economic and technological factors, as we show with a range of data coverage maps. We term awareness of and sensitivity to this context-dependence “climate data empathy,” and argue that context should be seen as a source of information to be communicated along with the data. Such context not only provides additional information about the data products, but may help in designing communication strategies and contribute more generally to raising awareness of the contingency of environmental data. Decision making should thus make use of both climate data and its context

Faecalibacterium prausnitzii A2-165 has a high capacity to induce IL-10 in human and murine dendritic cells and modulates T cell responses

Acknowledgements This work was financially supported by the EC FP7 Cross-talk project (PITN-GA-2008-215553). The authors thank the Histology Platform from GABI research unit and especially Abdelhak Boukadiri for their technical support in the histology sample preparation and Marlène Héry, Charline Pontlevoy, Jerome Pottier and André Tiffoche (UE0907 IERP, Jouy en Josas) for their help during animal experiments. The authors thank Rafael Muñoz-Tamayo (INRA) for his help in performing the PCA.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Dynamic Profiling of β-Coronavirus 3CL Mpro Protease Ligand-Binding Sites

β-coronavirus (CoVs) alone has been responsible for three major global outbreaks in the 21st century. The current crisis has led to an urgent requirement to develop therapeutics. Even though a number of vaccines are available, alternative strategies targeting essential viral components are required as a backup against the emergence of lethal viral variants. One such target is the main protease (Mpro) that plays an indispensable role in viral replication. The availability of over 270 Mpro X-ray structures in complex with inhibitors provides unique insights into ligand-protein interactions. Herein, we provide a comprehensive comparison of all nonredundant ligand-binding sites available for SARS-CoV2, SARS-CoV, and MERS-CoV Mpro. Extensive adaptive sampling has been used to investigate structural conservation of ligand-binding sites using Markov state models (MSMs) and compare conformational dynamics employing convolutional variational auto-encoder-based deep learning. Our results indicate that not all ligand-binding sites are dynamically conserved despite high sequence and structural conservation across β-CoV homologs. This highlights the complexity in targeting all three Mpro enzymes with a single pan inhibitor

Comparison of targeted metagenomics and IS-Pro methods for analysing the lung microbiome

BACKGROUND : Targeted metagenomics and IS-Pro method are two of the many methods that have been used to study the microbiome. The two methods target different regions of the 16 S rRNA gene. The aim of this study was to compare targeted metagenomics and IS-Pro methods for the ability to discern the microbial composition of the lung microbiome of COPD patients. METHODS : Spontaneously expectorated sputum specimens were collected from COPD patients. Bacterial DNA was extracted and used for targeted metagenomics and IS-Pro method. The analysis was performed using QIIME2 (targeted metagenomics) and IS-Pro software (IS-Pro method). Additionally, a laboratory cost per isolate and time analysis was performed for each method. RESULTS : Statistically significant differences were observed in alpha diversity when targeted metagenomics and ISPro methods’ data were compared using the Shannon diversity measure (p-value = 0.0006) but not with the Simpson diversity measure (p-value = 0.84). Distinct clusters with no overlap between the two technologies were observed for beta diversity. Targeted metagenomics had a lower relative abundance of phyla, such as the Proteobacteria, and higher relative abundance of phyla, such as Firmicutes when compared to the IS-Pro method. Haemophilus, Prevotella and Streptococcus were most prevalent genera across both methods. Targeted metagenomics classified 23 % (144/631) of OTUs to a species level, whereas IS-Pro method classified 86 % (55/64) of OTUs to a species level. However, unclassified OTUs accounted for a higher relative abundance when using the ISPro method (35 %) compared to targeted metagenomics (5 %). The two methods performed comparably in terms of cost and time; however, the IS-Pro method was more user-friendly. CONCLUSIONS : It is essential to understand the value of different methods for characterisation of the microbiome. Targeted metagenomics and IS-Pro methods showed differences in ability in identifying and characterising OTUs, diversity and microbial composition of the lung microbiome. The IS-Pro method might miss relevant species and could inflate the abundance of Proteobacteria. However, the IS-Pro kit identified most of the important lung pathogens, such as Burkholderia and Pseudomonas and may work in a more diagnostics-orientated setting. Both methods were comparable in terms of cost and time; however, the IS-Pro method was easier to use.SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: Table S1. Inclusion and exclusion criteria for COPD patients in this study. Table S2. Clinical characteristic of patients. Table S3. Comparison of the number of amplicons and operational taxonomic units for each sample for the targeted metagenomics and IS-Pro methods. Figure S1. Relative abundance of specific phyla in the sputum microbiome of COPD participants as detected by targeted metagenomics and IS-Pro methods (n = 23). The dots represent the different abundances of each sample, according to the different phyla. Phyla that are depicted with a single line on the y-axis were not present in any samples for that method. Figure S2. Bar plots showing the relative abundance of genera in the sputum microbiome of COPD participants as characterised by targeted metagenomics and IS-Pro methods (n = 23). The operational taxonomic units that could not be classified at a genus level are indicated as NA on the graph. Figure S3. The distribution of the unclassified operational taxonomic units (OTUs) at a class level of the sputum microbiome of COPD participants for targeted metagenomics and IS-Pro methods by phyla. At a class level, all the OTUs from targeted metagenomics could be classified.National Health Laboratory Service of South Africa (NHLS) Research Trusthttps://bmcmicrobiol.biomedcentral.comam2022Internal MedicineMedical Microbiolog

Inhibition of Macrophage Migration Inhibitory Factor Ameliorates Ocular Pseudomonas aeruginosa-Induced Keratitis

Pseudomonas aeruginosa causes severe sight-threatening corneal infections, with the inflammatory response to the pathogen being the major factor resulting in damage to the cornea that leads to loss of visual acuity. We found that mice deficient for macrophage migration inhibitory factor (MIF), a key regulator of inflammation, had significantly reduced consequences from acute P. aeruginosa keratitis. This improvement in the outcome was manifested as improved bacterial clearance, decreased neutrophil infiltration, and decreased inflammatory responses when P. aeruginosa-infected MIF knock out (KO) mice were compared to infected wild-type mice. Recombinant MIF applied to infected corneas restored the susceptibility of MIF deficient mice to P. aeruginosa-induced disease, demonstrating that MIF is necessary and sufficient to cause significant pathology at this immune privileged site. A MIF inhibitor administered during P. aeruginosa-induced infection ameliorated the disease-associated pathology. MIF regulated epithelial cell responses to infection by enhancing synthesis of proinflammatory mediators in response to P. aeruginosa infection and by promoting bacterial invasion of corneal epithelial cells, a correlate of virulence in the keratitis model. Our results uncover a host factor that elevates inflammation and propagates bacterial cellular invasion, and further suggest that inhibition of MIF during infection may have a beneficial therapeutic effect