The United Nations and ECLAC at the half-century mark of the Organization

Includes bibliography

Best practices, policy convergence and the WTO trade-related investment measures

Includes bibliography

Challenges for secondary education in Latin America

Includes bibliography

The determinants of recent foreign bank penetration in Brazil

Includes bibliography

Social vulnerability, insurance and risk diversification in Latin America and the Caribbean

Includes bibliography

Towards an integrated vision for dealing with instability and risk

Includes bibliography

Policies for economic diversification

Includes bibliography

Evolution of the link between selective anti-poverty policies and social sectors policies

Includes bibliography

Elusive development: the quest for a unified approach to development analysis and planning

Includes bibliography

La estimación de los años vividos con discapacidad: una iniciativa universal

Incluye Bibliografía

Investing better in order to invest more. Finance and management of education in Latin America and the Caribbean

Includes bibliography

The Development of a Universal In Silico Predictor of Protein-Protein Interactions

Protein-protein interactions (PPIs) are essential for understanding the function of biological systems and have been characterized using a vast array of experimental techniques. These techniques detect only a small proportion of all PPIs and are labor intensive and time consuming. Therefore, the development of computational methods capable of predicting PPIs accelerates the pace of discovery of new interactions. This paper reports a machine learning-based prediction model, the Universal In Silico Predictor of Protein-Protein Interactions (UNISPPI), which is a decision tree model that can reliably predict PPIs for all species (including proteins from parasite-host associations) using only 20 combinations of amino acids frequencies from interacting and non-interacting proteins as learning features. UNISPPI was able to correctly classify 79.4% and 72.6% of experimentally supported interactions and non-interacting protein pairs, respectively, from an independent test set. Moreover, UNISPPI suggests that the frequencies of the amino acids asparagine, cysteine and isoleucine are important features for distinguishing between interacting and non-interacting protein pairs. We envisage that UNISPPI can be a useful tool for prioritizing interactions for experimental validation. © 2013 Valente et al.

Four-Boson Systems Close to a Universal Regime

Universal properties of weakly-bound four-boson systems near the scaling limit are discussed by considering recent results obtained from the solution of Faddeev-Yakubovsky (FY) equations, which confirm a previous conjecture on a four-body scale dependence. In the present contribution, within a discussion on our numerical results obtained for the binding energies of two consecutive tetramer states, we are analyzing the relative relevance of the two possible configurations of the four-body system. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Wien.