Synchronous malignant vagal paraganglioma with contralateral carotid body paraganglioma treated by radiation therapy

Paragangliomas are rare tumors and very few cases of malignant vagal paraganglioma with synchronous carotid body paraganglioma have been reported. We report a case of a 20-year old male who presented with slow growing bilateral neck masses of eight years duration. He had symptoms of dysphagia to solids, occasional mouth breathing and hoarseness of voice. Fine needle aspiration cytology (FNAC) performed where he lived showed a sinus histiocytosis and he was administered anti-tubercular treatment for six months without any improvement in his symptoms. His physical examination revealed pulsatile, soft to firm, non-tender swellings over the anterolateral neck confined to the upper-mid jugulo-diagastric region on both sides. Direct laryngoscopy examination revealed a bulge on the posterior pharyngeal wall and another over the right lateral pharyngeal wall. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), 99mTc-labeled octreotide scan and angiography diagnosed the swellings as carotid body paraganglioma, stage III on the right side with left-sided vagal malignant paraganglioma. Surgery was ruled out as a high morbidity with additional risk to life was expected due to the highly vascular nature of the tumor. The patient was treated with radiation therapy by image guided radiation to a dose of 5040cGy in 28 fractions. At a follow-up at 16 months, the tumors have regressed bilaterally and the patient can take solids with ease

Ethnicity and Population Structure in Personal Naming Networks

Personal naming practices exist in all human groups and are far from random. Rather, they continue to reflect social norms and ethno-cultural customs that have developed over generations. As a consequence, contemporary name frequency distributions retain distinct geographic, social and ethno-cultural patterning that can be exploited to understand population structure in human biology, public health and social science. Previous attempts to detect and delineate such structure in large populations have entailed extensive empirical analysis of naming conventions in different parts of the world without seeking any general or automated methods of population classification by ethno-cultural origin. Here we show how 'naming networks', constructed from forename-surname pairs of a large sample of the contemporary human population in 17 countries, provide a valuable representation of cultural, ethnic and linguistic population structure around the world. This innovative approach enriches and adds value to automated population classification through conventional national data sources such as telephone directories and electoral registers. The method identifies clear social and ethno-cultural clusters in such naming networks that extend far beyond the geographic areas in which particular names originated, and that are preserved even after international migration. Moreover, one of the most striking findings of this approach is that these clusters simply 'emerge' from the aggregation of millions of individual decisions on parental naming practices for their children, without any prior knowledge introduced by the researcher. Our probabilistic approach to community assignment, both at city level as well as at a global scale, helps to reveal the degree of isolation, integration or overlap between human populations in our rapidly globalising world. As such, this work has important implications for research in population genetics, public health, and social science adding new understandings of migration, identity, integration and social interaction across the world

The changing landscape of disaster volunteering: opportunities, responses and gaps in Australia

There is a growing expectation that volunteers will have a greater role in disaster management in the future compared to the past. This is driven largely by a growing focus on building resilience to disasters. At the same time, the wider landscape of volunteering is fundamentally changing in the twenty-first century. This paper considers implications of this changing landscape for the resilience agenda in disaster management, with a focus on Australia. It first reviews major forces and trends impacting on disaster volunteering, highlighting four key developments: the growth of more diverse and episodic volunteering styles, the impact of new communications technology, greater private sector involvement and growing government expectations of and intervention in the voluntary sector. It then examines opportunities in this changing landscape for the Australian emergency management sector across five key strategic areas and provides examples of Australian responses to these opportunities to date. The five areas of focus are: developing more flexible volunteering strategies, harnessing spontaneous volunteering, building capacity to engage digital (and digitally enabled) volunteers, tapping into the growth of employee and skills-based volunteering and co-producing community-based disaster risk reduction. Although there have been considerable steps taken in Australia in some of these areas, overall there is still a long way to go before the sector can take full advantage of emerging opportunities. The paper thus concludes by identifying important research and practice gaps in this area

Expanding the diversity of mycobacteriophages: Insights into genome architecture and evolution

Mycobacteriophages are viruses that infect mycobacterial hosts such as Mycobacterium smegmatis and Mycobacterium tuberculosis. All mycobacteriophages characterized to date are dsDNA tailed phages, and have either siphoviral or myoviral morphotypes. However, their genetic diversity is considerable, and although sixty-two genomes have been sequenced and comparatively analyzed, these likely represent only a small portion of the diversity of the mycobacteriophage population at large. Here we report the isolation, sequencing and comparative genomic analysis of 18 new mycobacteriophages isolated from geographically distinct locations within the United States. Although no clear correlation between location and genome type can be discerned, these genomes expand our knowledge of mycobacteriophage diversity and enhance our understanding of the roles of mobile elements in viral evolution. Expansion of the number of mycobacteriophages grouped within Cluster A provides insights into the basis of immune specificity in these temperate phages, and we also describe a novel example of apparent immunity theft. The isolation and genomic analysis of bacteriophages by freshman college students provides an example of an authentic research experience for novice scientists. © 2011 Hatfull et al

Architecture of a nascent viral fusion pore

Enveloped viruses use specialized protein machinery to fuse the viral membrane with that of the host cell during cell invasion. In influenza virus, hundreds of copies of the haemagglutinin (HA) fusion glycoprotein project from the virus surface. Despite intensive study of HA and its fusion activity, the protein's modus operandi in manipulating viral and target membranes to catalyse their fusion is poorly understood. Here, the three-dimensional architecture of influenza virus–liposome complexes at pH 5.5 was investigated by electron cryo-tomography. Tomographic reconstructions show that early stages of membrane remodeling take place in a target membrane-centric manner, progressing from punctate dimples, to the formation of a pinched liposomal funnel that may impinge on the apparently unperturbed viral envelope. The results suggest that the M1 matrix layer serves as an endoskeleton for the virus and a foundation for HA during membrane fusion. Fluorescence spectroscopy monitoring fusion between liposomes and virions shows that leakage of liposome contents takes place more rapidly than lipid mixing at pH 5.5. The relation of ‘leaky' fusion to the observed prefusion structures is discussed

QCD and strongly coupled gauge theories : challenges and perspectives

We highlight the progress, current status, and open challenges of QCD-driven physics, in theory and in experiment. We discuss how the strong interaction is intimately connected to a broad sweep of physical problems, in settings ranging from astrophysics and cosmology to strongly coupled, complex systems in particle and condensed-matter physics, as well as to searches for physics beyond the Standard Model. We also discuss how success in describing the strong interaction impacts other fields, and, in turn, how such subjects can impact studies of the strong interaction. In the course of the work we offer a perspective on the many research streams which flow into and out of QCD, as well as a vision for future developments.Peer reviewe