BACKGROUND The meningococcal serogroup A (MenA) polysaccharide conjugate vaccine used in Sub-Saharan Africa does not prevent disease caused by MenW or MenX strains, which also cause epidemics in the region. We investigated the vaccine-potential of native outer membrane vesicles with over-expressed factor H-binding protein (NOMV-fHbp), which targeted antigens in African meningococcal strains, an...

A type of rooted map called (p, q, n)-dipole, whose numbers on surfaces have some applications in string theory, are defined and the numbers of (p, q, n)-dipoles on orientable surfaces of genus 1 and 2 are given by Visentin and Wieler (The Electronic Journal of Combinatorics 14 (2007),#R12). In this paper, we study the classification of (p, q, n)-dipoles on nonorientable surfaces and obtain the...

Tumor suppressor protein p53 plays important roles in initiating cell cycle arrest and promoting tumor cell apoptosis. Previous studies have shown that p53 is either mutated or defective in approximately 50% of human cancers; therefore restoring normal p53 activity in cancer cells might be an effective anticancer therapeutic approach. Herein, we designed a chimeric p53 protein flanked with the ...

IICR and ICRG country risk scores are examined in a decision tree framework to analyze groupings on countries, including Middle East and North Africa. INTRODUCTION The purpose of this paper is to examine if Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries form a distinct financial risk group, based on financial predictor variables and country risk scores. Country risk scores are calculated interna...

The Preference for Larger Cities in China: Evidence from Rural-Urban Migrants China has long aimed to restrict population growth in large cities but encourages growth in small and medium-sized cities. At the same time, various government policies favor large cities. We conjecture that larger cities in China have more urban amenities and a better quality of life. We thus predict that a typical r...

An important characteristic of the economic development in Europe and North America during the last few decades is a fast expansion of the business-service sector. The present paper aims at modeling the location dynamics of three categories of firms: (i) knowledge-intensive business-service firms, (ii) ordinary business-service firms and other firms, where the latter form the rest of the econom...

In direct competition between national brands of consumer packaged goods (CPG), one brand often has a large local share advantage over the other despite that the products are similar. I present an explanation for these large and persistent advantages in the context of local competition on perceived quality or brand image. The main result of the analysis is a relation between varying degrees of ...

We develop the knowledge flow production function (KFPF) as a flexible tool for modeling access to knowledge by individuals and economies. We focus on how knowledge flows are affected by the spatial and ethnic proximity of inventors, paying particular attention to how the two forms of proximity interact. In the context of three simple models, we show how the optimal spatial concentration for a ...

With a firm-level data set, we study the location decision of South Korean multinationals across China’s regions. Our conditional logit estimates confirm agglomeration effects along industry and along national lines.We add an upstream and downstream (backward and forward) linkage effect. We find that the presence of upstream and downstream South Korean affiliates significantly increases the lik...