The Colorado potato beetle, Leptinotarsa decemlineata, reared under diapause-inducing conditions will emerge from the soil as an adult and enter the diapause initiation phase, a period where metabolic reserves are stockpiled before the beetles enter the nonfeeding diapause maintenance phase. Internal and external lipids were characterized during the diapause initiation phase (IP) and compared t...

CD1 proteins are unique in their ability to present lipid Ags to T cells. Human CD1b shares significant amino acid homology with mouse CD1d1, which contains an unusual putative Ag-binding groove formed by two large hydrophobic pockets, A' and F'. We investigated the function of the amino acid residues that line the A' and F' pockets of CD1b by engineering 36 alanine-substitution mutants and ana...

This paper evaluates the effect of High Speed Rail (HSR) projects on the economic growth of targeted city nodes (HSR cities) in China using prefectural-level city data from 1990 to 2013. Employing a panel data program evaluation method devised by Hsiao, Chin and Wan (2012), we construct hypothetical counterfactuals for per capita real GDP of HSR cities in the absence of their respective HSR pro...

Counterfactual Analysis in Macroeconometrics: An Empirical Investigation into the Effects of Quantitative Easing This paper is concerned with ex ante and ex post counterfactual analyses in the case of macroeconometric applications where a single unit is observed before and after a given policy intervention. It distinguishes between cases where the policy change affects the model’s parameters an...

The European sovereign debt crisis revived the discussion concerning pros and cons of exchange rate adjustment in the face of asymmetric shocks. In the spirit of Keynes, exit from the euro area is to regain rapidly international competitiveness. In the spirit of Schumpeter, exchange rate stability with structural reforms would be beneficial towards the long-run growth performance. Previous lite...

The policy innovations that followed the recent Great Recession, such as unconventional monetary policies, prompted renewed interest in the question of how to measure the e¤ectiveness of such policy interventions. To test policy e¤ectiveness requires a model to construct a counterfactual for the outcome variable in the absence of the policy intervention and a way to determine whether the di¤ere...

Time trends of age-standardized rate (ASR) of uterine cancer incidence (ICD-10: cervix uteri (C53), corpus uteri (C54)) were compared among 18 selected cancer registries and ethnic/racial groups in East Asia, Europe and the USA. The data source was the World population was used for age-standardization. Figure 1 shows the time trends of ASR of cervix uteri cancer incidence. In East Asia, Hong Ko...

Trypanosoma cruzi, the parasite causing Chagas disease, contains a number of proteolytic enzymes. The recent completion of the genome sequence of the T. cruzi CL Brener clone suggests the presence of 70 cysteine peptidases, 40 serine peptidases (none of them from the chymotrypsin family), about 250 metallopeptidases (most leishmanolysin homologues), 25 threonine peptidases, and only two asparty...

PURPOSE In Bulgaria, there are over 3700 cases diagnosed with breast cancer annually and over 3300 with gynecological cancers. The purpose of this study was to estimate the burden of breast and gynecological cancers in Bulgaria, analyzing trends of incidence, mortality and survival for the past two decades. METHODS Data from the Bulgarian National Cancer Registry for women diagnosed with canc...

Autophagy is an important catabolic process with roles in cell survival and cell death. It sequesters cytosol and organelles within double-membrane autophagosomes that deliver their contents to lysosomes for degradation. Autophagosome biogenesis is coordinated by the autophagy-related protein 4 (Atg4) family of C54 endopeptidases (Atg4A-Atg4D). These enzymes prime and then later delipidate the ...