Genomic organization of the mouse T-cell receptor β-chain gene family

We have combined three different methods, deletion mapping of T-cell lines, field-inversion gel electrophoresis, and the restriction mapping of a cosmid clone, to construct a physical map of the murine T-cell receptor β-chain gene family. We have mapped 19 variable (Vβ) gene segments and the two clusters of diversity (Dβ) and joining (Jβ) gene segments and constant (Cβ) genes. These members of the β-chain gene family span ~450 kilobases of DNA, excluding one potential gap in the DNA fragment alignments

Insights into Analogy Completion from the Biomedical Domain

Analogy completion has been a popular task in recent years for evaluating the semantic properties of word embeddings, but the standard methodology makes a number of assumptions about analogies that do not always hold, either in recent benchmark datasets or when expanding into other domains. Through an analysis of analogies in the biomedical domain, we identify three assumptions: that of a Single Answer for any given analogy, that the pairs involved describe the Same Relationship, and that each pair is Informative with respect to the other. We propose modifying the standard methodology to relax these assumptions by allowing for multiple correct answers, reporting MAP and MRR in addition to accuracy, and using multiple example pairs. We further present BMASS, a novel dataset for evaluating linguistic regularities in biomedical embeddings, and demonstrate that the relationships described in the dataset pose significant semantic challenges to current word embedding methods.Comment: Accepted to BioNLP 2017. (10 pages

Notch Cleavage: Nicastrin Helps Presenilin Make the Final Cut

AbstractPresenilin is thought to be the proteolytic component of γ-secretase, responsible for the intramembranous cleavage of substrates that include the activated Notch receptor. Recent studies have identified the novel protein Nicastrin as another essential component of the Presenilin/γ-secretase complex

Accession Rules and Trade Agreements: The Case of the WTO

This paper models the accession process to the World Trade Organization (WTO) as a two stage game. In the first stage, member countries choose tariff rates to be applied on trade with each other. In the second stage a non-member country applies for membership in the agreement and negotiates with the member countries over the tariff rates to be applied. Based on the rules of the WTO accession process, we model this negotiation using the Nash bargaining solution. The analysis focuses on the question of how the pattern of trade between the acceding country and the member countries affects the distribution of gains from accession between the members and the acceding countries, given the rules of the WTO negotiation process. We consider two n good, n country trade models which highlight features of the WTO tariff negotiations. The first is a model in which each country imports one good from all of the other countries (competing supplier model). This model highlights the role of the MFN principle, since member countries are forced to extend the same tariff treatment to non-members when they join. We show that the non-member will free ride on tariff reductions among the member countries in this case, and that the non-member will gain a larger fraction of the gains from accession if transport costs are sufficiently low. The second model considers a case in which each country exports a single good to the other countries (principal supplier model). We show that in this case tariff reductions by the member countries reduce the welfare of the non-member country, and the member countries gain a larger share of the gains from accession.