Opportunities for UK reinsurance broker on Russian insurance market

Due to positive developments on Russian insurance sector and its great potential an increasing number of international insurance, reinsurance and reinsurance broking companies focus their expansion strategies on Russian market as on one of the regions, which possess a tremendous amount of opportunity. We develop a strategy for the client to increase the amount of business the company transacts with Russian insurance sector, we identified a number of opportunities for potential business development on Russian insurance market. Recommendations conclude our analysis and findings

In search of lost introns

Many fundamental questions concerning the emergence and subsequent evolution of eukaryotic exon-intron organization are still unsettled. Genome-scale comparative studies, which can shed light on crucial aspects of eukaryotic evolution, require adequate computational tools. We describe novel computational methods for studying spliceosomal intron evolution. Our goal is to give a reliable characterization of the dynamics of intron evolution. Our algorithmic innovations address the identification of orthologous introns, and the likelihood-based analysis of intron data. We discuss a compression method for the evaluation of the likelihood function, which is noteworthy for phylogenetic likelihood problems in general. We prove that after $O(nL)$ preprocessing time, subsequent evaluations take $O(nL/\log L)$ time almost surely in the Yule-Harding random model of $n$-taxon phylogenies, where $L$ is the input sequence length. We illustrate the practicality of our methods by compiling and analyzing a data set involving 18 eukaryotes, more than in any other study to date. The study yields the surprising result that ancestral eukaryotes were fairly intron-rich. For example, the bilaterian ancestor is estimated to have had more than 90% as many introns as vertebrates do now

Day Plots of Bacterial Magnetite from Sediments of Shira Lake (Khakassia, Russia)

The domain state of magnetite detected in sediments of Shira lake (Khakassia, Russia) was examined by means of magnetic hysteresis. Analysis of experimental data obtained on samples from different parts of bottom sediment cores in terms of Day plots allowed us to conclude that magnetite particles are in the pseudo-single-domain state. This indicates respectively small size of magnetite particles (< 100 nm) and reveals their bacterial origin. Biogenic magnetite buried in the bottom sediments can indicate the climatic changes in the Shira lake level in the Late Holocen

Genome-wide changes in protein translation efficiency are associated with autism

We previously proposed that changes in the efficiency of protein translation are associated with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). This hypothesis connects environmental factors and genetic factors because each can alter translation efficiency. For genetic factors, we previously tested our hypothesis using a small set of ASD-associated genes, a small set of ASD-associated variants, and a statistic to quantify by how much a single nucleotide variant (SNV) in a protein coding region changes translation speed. In this study, we confirm and extend our hypothesis using a published set of 1,800 autism quartets (parents, one affected child and one unaffected child) and genome-wide variants. Then, we extend the test statistic to combine translation efficiency with other possibly relevant variables: ribosome profiling data, presence/absence of CpG dinucleotides, and phylogenetic conservation. The inclusion of ribosome profiling abundances strengthens our results for male–male sibling pairs. The inclusion of CpG information strengthens our results for female–female pairs, giving an insight into the significant gender differences in autism incidence. By combining the single-variant test statistic for all variants in a gene, we obtain a single gene score to evaluate how well a gene distinguishes between affected and unaffected siblings. Using statistical methods, we compute gene sets that have some power to distinguish between affected and unaffected siblings by translation efficiency of gene variants. Pathway and enrichment analysis of those gene sets suggest the importance of Wnt signaling pathways, some other pathways related to cancer, ATP binding, and ATP-ase pathways in the etiology of ASDs

On a necessary aspect for the Riesz basis property for indefinite Sturm-Liouville problems

In 1996, H. Volkmer observed that the inequality $$(\int_{-1}^1\frac{1}{|r|}|f'|dx)^2 \le K^2 \int_{-1}^1|f|^2dx\int_{-1}^1\Big|\Big(\frac{1}{r}f'\Big)'\Big|^2dx$$ is satisfied with some positive constant $K>0$ for a certain class of functions $f$ on $[-1,1]$ if the eigenfunctions of the problem $$-y"=\lambda\, r(x)y,\quad y(-1)=y(1)=0$$ form a Riesz basis of the Hilbert space $L^2_{|r|}(-1,1)$. Here the weight $r\in L^1(-1,1)$ is assumed to satisfy $xr(x)>0$ a.e. on $[-1,1]$. We present two criteria in terms of Weyl-Titchmarsh $m$-functions for the Volkmer inequality to be valid. Using these results we show that this inequality is valid if the operator associated with the spectral problem satisfies the linear resolvent growth condition. In particular, we show that the Riesz basis property of eigenfunctions is equivalent to the linear resolvent growth if $r$ is odd.Comment: 26 page