Fragmenting clearing across multiple central counter-parties (CCPs) is costly. This because dealers providing liquidity globally, cannot net trades cleared in different CCPs and this increases their collateral costs. These costs are then passed on to clients through price distortions which take the form of a differential (basis) when same products CCPs. Using proprietary data, we document an ec...

We study the problem of clearing connections by agents placed at some vertices in a directed graph. The agents can move only along directed paths. The objective is to minimize the number of agents guaranteeing that any pair of vertices can be connected by a underlying undirected path that can be cleared by the agents. We provide several results on the hardness, approximability and parameterized...

To assess ecological consequences of bushmeat hunting in African lowland rainforests, we compared paired sites, with high and low hunting pressure, in three areas of southeastern Nigeria. In hunted sites, populations of important seed dispersers-both small and large primates (including the Cross River gorilla, Gorilla gorilla diehli)-were drastically reduced. Large rodents were more abundant in...

The susceptibility of peach GF 305 seedlings and herbaceous plants to five plum pox virus (PPV) isolates from orchards of western Slovakia was investigated. PPV was isolated from diseased plum, apricot and peach trees, and transmitted by chip-budding to peach GF 305. The herbaceous plants were infected by mechanical inoculation. The transmission was analysed by symptomatology and double sandwic...

Molecular interactions of optical clearing agents were investigated using a combination of molecular dynamics (MD) simulations and optical spectroscopy. For a series of sugar alcohols with low to high optical clearing potential, Raman spectroscopy and integrating sphere measurements were used to quantitatively characterize tissue water loss and reduction in light scattering following agent expo...

Generally, chemical tissue clearing is performed by a solution consisting of two parts benzyl benzoate and one part benzyl alcohol. However, prolonged exposure to this mixture markedly reduces the fluorescence of GFP expressing specimens, so that one has to compromise between clearing quality and fluorescence preservation. This can be a severe drawback when working with specimens exhibiting low...

Sample preparation for confocal microscopy typically involves fixing and staining, followed by clearing and mounting. Clearing involves treatment with solvent to dissolve lipids and other structures that cause light scattering and reduce the ability to image through thick specimens. Mounting involves transfer of the specimen into a medium which matches the refractive index the objective is desi...