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The authors develop new measures of influence strategies in marketing channels (i.e., the means by which a firm's personnel communicate with its partners to affect their behavior) in order to examine associations with the strength of buyer-seller relationships (relationalism) and alternative governance structures (market, administered, franchise, and corporate). Study 1 was a field test of the new multi-item measure of influence strategies in a contractual channel system. The results confirm the predicted negative association between relationalism and the following influence strategies: threats, legalistic pleas, and requests. Study 2 replicated tests of the psychometric quality of the scales in all four forms of governance. The results show that (1) the frequency of recommendations, promises, and information exchange is associated positively with a global measure of relationalism and (2) the frequency of almost all supplier communications differs across the four governance structures.

One approach to designing RNA nanoscale structures is to use known RNA structural motifs such as junctions, kissing loops or bulges and to construct a molecular model by connecting these building blocks with helical struts. We previously developed an algorithm for detecting internal loops, junctions and kissing loops in RNA structures. Here we present algorithms for automating or assisting many of the steps that are involved in creating RNA structures from building blocks: (1) assembling building blocks into nanostructures using either a combinatorial search or constraint satisfaction; (2) optimizing RNA 3D ring structures to improve ring closure; (3) sequence optimisation; (4) creating a unique non-degenerate RNA topology descriptor. This effectively creates a computational pipeline for generating molecular models of RNA nanostructures and more specifically RNA ring structures with optimized sequences from RNA building blocks. We show several examples of how the algorithms can be utilized to generate RNA tecto-shapes.

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