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AbstractThis research addresses equity in geographic access to financial services. As financial products and services continue to become more accessible and affordable, many low‐ to moderate‐income Americans remain unbanked and underbanked, relying instead upon informal, alternative financial service providers, including check cashing outlets and payday lenders. While geographic access to affordable financial products and services assists in the successful asset building strategies of economically vulnerable households, concerns that access to financial services is uneven persist. This article uses geographic information systems and spatial binary logistic regression analysis to test the hypothesis that sociodemographic characteristics and mortgage lending variables have a predictive relationship on the presence of financial deserts—census tracts where check cashing outlets are more prevalent than banks—in southeastern Pennsylvania. Results of comparison of means and regression analysis reveal that these tracts are associated with higher than average population density, lower levels of median household income, a higher proportion of Black and Latinx residents, and higher levels of mortgage application denial. This article contributes to the ongoing debate over the emergence of a two‐tiered or dual financial service delivery system, whereby financial products and services are bifurcated based on socioeconomic status and geography.

AbstractAccess to safe and affordable financial services is essential to the economic well‐being of individual households and entire urban neighborhoods. However, prior research raises concerns about spatial inequities in the distribution of brick‐and‐mortar financial services offerings—either mainstream financial institutions or alternative 'fringe' financial service providers—and the resulting implications for financial inclusion and social justice. This study uses a novel method to identify fringe financial ecologies that captures the recent tandem processes of abandonment by mainstream financial institutions and the proliferation of alternative financial service providers. We explore how fringe financial ecologies potentially overlap existing inequalities of race, class and subprime mortgage lending in two US metropolitan areas, Los Angeles, California, and Miami, Florida. Our results raise concerns that communities of color, low‐income neighborhoods and otherwise vulnerable segments of the population are disproportionately at risk of both financial exclusion and predatory targeting. We find that fringe financial ecologies are associated with a high prevalence of subprime mortgage lending. The results advance an understanding of financial ecologies that raises awareness about place‐based financial exclusion as a form of systemic racism in the broader context of the national reckoning with racial justice in the US.

New experimental techniques in epigenomics allow researchers to assay a diversity of highly dynamic features such as histone marks, DNA modifications or chromatin structure. The study of their fluctuations should provide insights into gene expression regulation, cell differentiation and disease. The Ensembl project collects and maintains the Ensembl regulation data resources on epigenetic marks, transcription factor binding and DNA methylation for human and mouse, as well as microarray probe mappings and annotations for a variety of chordate genomes. From this data, we produce a functional annotation of the regulatory elements along the human and mouse genomes with plans to expand to other species as data becomes available. Starting from well-studied cell lines, we will progressively expand our library of measurements to a greater variety of samples. Ensembl's regulation resources provide a central and easy-to-query repository for reference epigenomes. As with all Ensembl data, it is freely available at http://www.ensembl.org, from the Perl and REST APIs and from the public Ensembl MySQL database server at ensembldb.ensembl.org.Database URL: http://www.ensembl.org. ; Wellcome Trust grant: (WT098051); National Human Genome Research Institute grants: (U41HG007234, 1U01 HG004695); Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council grant: (BB/L024225/1); European Molecular Biology Laboratory; European Union's Seventh Framework Programme; European Research Council.

Computational approaches in drug discovery and development hold great promise, with artificial intelligence methods undergoing widespread contemporary use, but the experimental validation of these new approaches is frequently inadequate. We are initiating Critical Assessment of Computational Hit-finding Experiments (CACHE) as a public benchmarking project that aims to accelerate the development of small molecule hit-finding algorithms by competitive assessment. Compounds will be identified by participants using a wide range of computational methods for dozens of protein targets selected for different types of prediction scenarios, as well as for their potential biological or pharmaceutical relevance. Community-generated predictions will be tested centrally and rigorously in an experimental hub(s), and all data, including the chemical structures of experimentally tested compounds, will be made publicly available without restrictions. The ability of a range of computational approaches to find novel compounds will be evaluated, compared, and published. The overarching goal of CACHE is to accelerate the development of computational chemistry methods by providing rapid and unbiased feedback to those developing methods, with an ancillary and valuable benefit of identifying new compound-protein binding pairs for biologically interesting targets. The initiative builds on the power of crowd sourcing and expands the open science paradigm for drug discovery. ; ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The Structural Genomics Consortium is a registered charity (no: 1097737) that receives funds from Bayer AG, Boehringer Ingelheim, Bristol Myers Squibb, Genentech, Genome Canada through Ontario Genomics Institute [OGI-196], Janssen, Merck KGaA (aka EMD in Canada and US), Pfizer, Takeda and the Innovative Medicines Initiative 2 Joint Undertaking (JU) under grant agreement No 875510. The JU receives support from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and EFPIA and Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, Royal Institution for ...