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The article reports on the 500 million euros collateralized bond obligation sold by the Royal Bank of Scotland to Taiwanese investors in a structure that allows them to gain greater exposure to foreign assets.

The article reports that some credit traders are hoping for a rapid increase in credit-default swap (CDS) flows in Australia amid the rise in CDS trading volumes on the back of the buyout of Qantas Airways.

The article focuses on a call by Indian government officials on financial regulators to further tighten rules regarding the use of derivative-backed structures called participatory notes in response to concerns that they are being sold to Indian investors and may be misused.

The article considers the plans of financial institutions to expand credit origination and sales in 2007 by 20 percent.

The article reports that Macquarie is considering expanding its structured investment business in the Americas.

The article reports on the effort of Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria to build an Asian sales and trading presence for interest-rate and foreign-exchange swaps, structured investments and equity derivatives.

The interactions of calf thymus DNA polymerase α (pol α) with primer/templates were examined. Simply changing the primer from DNA to RNA had little effect on primer/template binding or dNTP polymerization (Km, Vmax and processivity). Surprisingly, however, adding a 5′-triphosphate to the primer greatly changed its interactions with pol α (binding, Vmax and Km and processivity). While changing the primer from DNA to RNA greatly altered the ability of pol α to discriminate against nucleotide analogs, it did not compromise the ability of pol α to discriminate against non-cognate dNTPs. Thus the nature of the primer appears to affect ‘sugar fidelity’, without altering ‘base fidelity’. DNase protection assays showed that pol α strongly protected 9 nt of the primer strand, 13 nt of the duplex template strand and 14 nt of the single-stranded template from hydrolysis by DNase I and weakly protected several bases outside this core region. This large DNA binding domain may account for the ability of a 5′-triphosphate on RNA primers to alter the catalytic properties of pol α.