Chromatin reorganisation in Epstein-Barr virus-infected cells and its role in cancer development

The oncogenic Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) growth transforms B cells and drives lymphoma and carcinoma development. The virus encodes four key transcription factors (EBNA2, EBNA3A, EBNA3B and EBNA3C) that hijack host cell factors to bind gene control elements and reprogramme infected B cells. These viral factors predominantly target long-range enhancers to alter the expression of host cell genes that control B cell growth and survival and facilitate virus persistence. Enhancer and superenhancer binding by these EBNAs results in large-scale reorganisation of three-dimensional enhancer–promoter architecture to drive the overexpression of oncogenes, the silencing of tumour suppressors and the modulation of transcription, cell-cycle progression, migration and adhesion

Phenomenologically productive "creation" stories: Aboriginal health discourse and mass media coverage of the Kashechewan "crisis"

In this article I examine, through a case study of newspaper re-presentations of the Kasheche-wan crisis in late 2005, how the discursive discourse nodes of the academy/medicine and the mass media phenomenologically create and circulate conceptualizations of the “disordered” Aboriginal (Waldram 2004). To invoke the “disordered” Aboriginal, texts stemming from the academy/medicine and such innocuous products as the daily newspaper draw delineations between seemingly “unhealthy” Aboriginal peoples and their “healthy” mainstream coun-terparts (Crawford 1994). As I discuss in the article, these binaries come into relief during a health crisis and the mass media coverage of the events at Kashechewan invoke spatial and cultural metaphors to create native=reserve=poor=sick associations. The drawing of such figurative cordon sanitaires rests upon static notions of Aboriginal culture, which stem from early colonial renditions of Aboriginal peoples (Doxtator 1992). Ultimately, the textual co-lonialism unearthed in this article works to perpetuate policy decisions that reinforce the subordinate status of Aboriginal peoples in Canada

Self-Reported Family Income and Expenditure Patterns for a Cohort of TANF-Reliant African American Women: Outcomes From a Longitudinal Study in Miami-Dade County, Florida

This mixed-method study was designed to analyze the impact of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 on a cohort of welfare-reliant African American women in Miami-Dade County. A snowball sampling technique was utilized to identify and conduct in-person interviews with women who were receiving welfare benefits from January 1997 to March 2000. The study intended to determine the participant characteristics, employment and wage histories, annualized income, and annualized expenditures over the time span. The results indicate that the average age of recipients was 34.5 years old with four children. The average educational attainment for the cohort was 11.7 years and the average time receiving welfare benefits was 6. 2 years. The majority of women in the study had previous or current employment in the service industry. The average annualized expenditures for the cohort was $13,296 and the average annualized income was$16, 198. The results indicate that women who participated in the study have substantial barriers to attaining economic security. In addition, the policies implemented by welfare reform may, in fact, be detrimental to improving self-sufficiency

THE RUSTY YEARS: SENIORS’ SOCIAL NETWORKING IN RETIREMENT

This thesis investigates how retirees in the Greater Toronto Area experienced the transition from work to retirement and how they dealt with the changes that they experienced. In particular, this work considers how individuals’ social networks are altered during the process of retirement and how individuals develop new social networks in order to adjust to these alterations. Anthropological methods of inquiry—participant- observation, individual interviews, and focus groups—were used to explore these phenomena. The results of this study reveal how recreational centers for seniors, and the programs offered at these centers, help retirees connect to their peers and their communities and thereby provide them with access to valuable social networks. In addition, this study suggests reasons for incorporating said centers into the alternative healthcare sector. This work and its findings are likely to be of interest to anyone studying the relationships between ageing, retirement, social networks, and/or health

Is it Worth the shot? Ontario Women's Negotiations of Risk, Gender and the Human Papillomavirous(HPV) Vaccine

This research project has been an endeavor in understanding how Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine policy became gendered in Canada, how women in Ontario negotiated the concepts of “risk” and “gender” deployed in pharmaceutical marketing and public health programming, and how they folded these mediations into decision making about the vaccine. Eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork revealed that the federal and Ontario governments developed HPV vaccine policy by using gender based analyses frames, based on the parameters of Merck Frosst’s gender-based marketing. This case study of the HPV vaccine highlights how corporations and governments work hand and hand to set public health policy in the neoliberal era of public health. However, these sales/governance strategies and the gendered at-risk subject formation they created and circulated were not passively integrated by women into their daily lives. The women interviewed – mothers of daughters affected by the grade eight school vaccination program, women university students and patients at a hospital vaccine clinic – demonstrated that the concepts of “risk” and “gender” are productive and movable ontological modes of being, which shift in and out of focus depending upon the context. Mothers were intensely focused on gender and doing mothering, students were doing gender politics and intermittent risk, and patients were living with risk. What sales/governance strategies had tried to “fix,” women continually unfixed. These accounts of situated risk and gender demonstrated that when assembled, women’s experiences helped transform their ethical being or sense of self. This knowledge of the self then informed vaccination decisions. Thus, decision making was not a discrete event or a linear, cost-benefit analysis. Instead it was an inherently social and cultural process, which was embedded in women’s experiences of finding meaning in their efforts to be good mothers, strong young women emerging into adulthood and pre-cancerous patients seeking respite amid the anxiety of protracted medical procedures. Women’s ontological decision making provides an analytical framework through which to tie together risk- and gender-related theory, individual accounts of risk encounters and the social, political, historical and economic context in which these mediations occur

Spt5 Cooperates with Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 Tat by Preventing Premature RNA Release at Terminator Sequences

The human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) Tat protein activates transcription elongation by stimulating the Tat-activated kinase (TAK/p-TEFb), a protein kinase composed of CDK9 and its cyclin partner, cyclin T1. CDK9 is able to hyperphosphorylate the carboxyl-terminal domain (CTD) of the large subunit of RNA polymerase during elongation. In addition to TAK, the transcription elongation factor Spt5 is required for the efficient activation of transcriptional elongation by Tat. To study the role of Spt5 in HIV transcription in more detail, we have developed a three-stage Tat-dependent transcription assay that permits the isolation of active preinitiation complexes, early-stage elongation complexes, and Tat-activated elongation complexes. Spt5 is recruited in the transcription complex shortly after initiation. After recruitment of Tat during elongation through the transactivation response element RNA, CDK9 is activated and induces hyperphosphorylation of Spt5 in parallel to the hyperphosphorylation of the CTD of RNA polymerase II. However, immunodepletion experiments demonstrate that Spt5 is not required for Tat-dependent activation of the kinase. Chase experiments using the Spt5-depleted extracts demonstrate that Spt5 is not required for early elongation. However, Spt5 plays an important role in late elongation by preventing the premature dissociation of RNA from the transcription complex at terminator sequences and reducing the amount of polymerase pausing at arrest sites, including bent DNA sequences. This novel biochemical function of Spt5 is analogous to the function of NusG, an elongation factor found in Escherichia coli that enhances RNA polymerase stability on templates and shows sequence similarity to Spt5

The environmental temperature of the residential care home: role in thermal comfort and mental health?

BACKGROUND: In the midst of changing environmental conditions and increasing populations aged over 65 years, how best to provide nursing care that promotes mental health and wellbeing within residential aged care facilities is an important concern. AIM/OBJECTIVE: To explore the perceptions of temperature control, thermal comfort and nursing care in a small group of older Australians. DESIGN: Descriptive, qualitative study using thematic analysis. METHODS: Individual semi-structured interviews (March to April 2017) were conducted with a group of older Australians who live within an aged care facility in NSW, Australia. Interviews were taped, transcribed and then analysed using thematic analysis. RESULTS: Five adults (three male and 2 female) participated. Themes emerging included: (1) Reliance on habitual behaviour to cope with temperature; (2) The importance of mobility to cope with temperature; (3) Balancing nursing care and resident autonomy. The importance of experiencing a sense of choice and ability to self-regulate personal environment arose as a substantial concern. CONCLUSIONS: The attention of older residents to personal issues related to thermal comfort linked to physical and mental health emphasise the importance of concerns regarding mobility, nursing care and autonomy. For older age residents the interplay between thermal comfort and behaviour adaptation is influenced by nurses and their control of the residential environment. Impact statement: Nursing staff need to consider aged care residents personal preference in choosing thermal control measures, thereby enhancing autonomy and resident satisfaction

Housing Cost Burden and Maternal Stress among Very Low Income Mothers

As the affordable housing shortage proliferates, more American households struggle with high housing cost burdens. Grounded in Belsky’s (1984) parenting stress framework, we use a weighted low-income sample from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study of mothers who rent their homes (N=388) to investigate a relationship between housing cost burden, or paying a substantial portion of income toward housing, and higher rates of reported maternal stress. Findings of the linear regression indicate that younger mothers and those paying 30% or more of their income each month toward rent have higher reported maternal stress scores. These findings are discussed with attention to practice and policy implications

List precoloring extension in planar graphs

A celebrated result of Thomassen states that not only can every planar graph be colored properly with five colors, but no matter how arbitrary palettes of five colors are assigned to vertices, one can choose a color from the corresponding palette for each vertex so that the resulting coloring is proper. This result is referred to as 5-choosability of planar graphs. Albertson asked whether Thomassen's theorem can be extended by precoloring some vertices which are at a large enough distance apart in a graph. Here, among others, we answer the question in the case when the graph does not contain short cycles separating precolored vertices and when there is a "wide" Steiner tree containing all the precolored vertices.Comment: v2: 15 pages, 11 figres, corrected typos and new proof of Theorem 3(2