Category Archives: Viva!

A third of Britons have helped refugees in some way, poll finds

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Survey finds 31% of British population have given donations in money or kind, and 1.8m households have offered to house refugees in their homes

Almost a third of people in Britain have personally backed the refugee relief effort in the last month, according to a new opinion poll on the crisis.

The Populus survey for the Charities Aid Foundation shows that more than six million people – 12% of the population – have given money to a refugee charity appeal, 10% have donated food, clothes or other goods, while a further 9% have either volunteered their time or backed social media campaigns supporting refugees.

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Superpod of leaping dolphins delights sightseers in Costa Rica – video

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Stunned sightseers off the coast of Costa Rica find their small boat surrounded by a ‘superpod’ of dolphins, racing alongside and leaping into the air. Orlando Marin, who posted his footage to Facebook, says they numbered in the thousands. Such a large gathering can be the result of abundant food in the area, or can happen spontaneously

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Paraplegic man walks with own legs again | Science | The Guardian

A man who lost the use of his legs to a spinal cord injury has walked again after scientists rerouted signals from his brain to electrodes on his knees. The 26-year-old American was confined to a wheelchair five years ago after an accident left him paralysed from the waist down. Doctors said he was the first person with paraplegia caused by a spinal injury to walk without relying on robotic limbs that are controlled manually.

Source: Paraplegic man walks with own legs again | Science | The Guardian

NIH/Nature: The Soft Palate As A Site For Influenza Virus Adaptation

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Credit Wikipedia

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The Journal Nature has published a new study, and the NIH has published an overview, on research that has found a fascinating (and unexpected) role of the soft palate in the adaptation, evolution and transmission of influenza viruses.  

 

Since we’ve discussed receptor binding often in the past (see here, here, here, here and here for just a few), and the NIH announcement does a good  job of describing both the background and  this research, I’ll simply provide a link to the study (much of which is behind a pay wall), and then a link and some excerpts from the detailed NIH press release.

First a link to the Abstract in Nature.

 

The soft palate is an important site of adaptation for transmissible influenza viruses

Seema S. Lakdawala, Akila Jayaraman, Rebecca A. Halpin, Elaine W. Lamirande, Angela R. Shih, Timothy B. Stockwell, Xudong Lin, Ari Simenauer, Christopher T. Hanson, Leatrice Vogel, Myeisha Paskel, Mahnaz Minai, Ian Moore, Marlene Orandle, Suman R. Das, David E. Wentworth, Ram Sasisekharan & Kanta Subbarao Affiliations

Nature  (2015) doi:10.1038/nature15379

Published online  23 September 2015

 

 

This from the NIH.  Follow the link to read the whole fascinating story.

 

Embargoed for Release: Wednesday, September 23, 2015, 1 p.m. EDT

 

NIH researchers find role for soft palate in adaptation of transmissible influenza viruses

National Institutes of Health scientists and their colleagues identified a previously unappreciated role for the soft palate during research to better understand how influenza (flu) viruses acquire the ability to move efficiently between people. In studies using ferrets, the team collected evidence that this patch of mucous-coated soft tissue separating the mouth from the nasal cavity is a key site for the emergence of flu viruses with a heightened ability to spread through the air. The finding could aid efforts to define the properties governing flu virus transmissibility and predict which viruses are most likely to spark pandemics.

Microscope image of the soft palate

Flu viruses enter cells by binding to sialic acids on surface glycoproteins. In ferrets, pigs, and people, the nasopharyngeal surface of the soft palate contains regions of densely packed long-chain a2,6 sialic acid molecules (shown in green) where influenza viruses with airborne transmissibility can outcompete less transmissible virus. Credit: NIAID

The research was led by Kanta Subbarao, M.D., of NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and Ram Sasisekharan, Ph.D., of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge. Their report is published online in the journal Nature.

Flu infection in mammals starts when an influenza virus protein called hemagglutinin binds to sialic acid (SA) molecules on the tops of chain-like proteins that thickly line tissue throughout the respiratory tract. Flu viruses adapted to humans and other mammals bind preferentially to a type of SA called alpha 2,6 SA (α2,6 SA), which is the predominant form found in the upper respiratory tract of mammals, while avian flu viruses bind best to a form, α2,3 SA, that predominates in birds.

Dr. Subbarao and her colleagues began their research by making four mutations in the hemagglutinin of the flu strain responsible for the 2009 influenza pandemic, a strain notoriously good at spreading from person to person. The intent of introducing the mutations was to make the virus preferentially bind to bird-type SA and, presumably, be less transmissible via air than the original virus. They then used the engineered virus to infect a group of ferrets, which are widely used as a model of human influenza infection. The next day, uninfected ferrets were placed in cages separated from infected ferrets by a perforated barrier. Nasal secretions were collected from all of the animals for two weeks.

“To our surprise,” said Dr. Subbarao, “the engineered flu virus was transmitted by the airborne route to uninfected ferrets just as well as the original non-mutated virus.”

To understand this unexpected result, the researchers sequenced viral genetic material obtained from the ferret nasal washes. The sequencing was done by a team at the J. Craig Venter Institute, Rockville, Maryland. They discovered that airborne transmission was associated with a single genetic change in the engineered virus’s hemagglutinin that gave it the ability to bind to mammalian-type α2,6 SA of a particular class (long chain) without the loss of the other introduced changes that had made it a α2,3 SA binding type. This genetic reversion, Dr. Subbarao noted, appears to have occurred within 24 hours of administering the engineered flu virus to the experimentally infected ferrets. Subsequently, they passed it on to uninfected ferrets in the adjacent cages.

Next, the team looked at tissues from several locations in the ferrets’ upper and lower respiratory tract to more precisely define the location of the reverted, long chain α2,6 SA-binding virus. They infected groups of ferrets with the engineered virus — containing the same four mutations in hemagglutinin as in the first set of experiments — and three, five or seven days later, took tissue samples from various locations, including the soft palate.

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“I was a maître d’ at a restaurant for thirteen years. But one…

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“I was a maître d’ at a restaurant for thirteen years. But one week I got a really bad case of pneumonia that put me in the hospital. While I was lying in that hospital bed, I was thinking about how I really didn’t want to go back to work. Then that motivational speaker came on TV. You know– the one that has all those teeth in his mouth. And he said: ‘Think back to what made you happy when you were young! That’s what you should be doing!’ Well I grew up in the country, and I always had a lot of dogs, so I thought that nothing would make me happier than to be a dog walker. But I knew I needed to distinguish myself. So I decided to make a uniform. I smoked a joint and came up with this outfit. I wanted people to look at me and think: ‘If this man is walking our dog, and there’s some sort of major disaster, he’s going to survive. He’s going to fish for those dogs. He’s going to build a bunker and shelter those dogs until it’s safe to bring them home.’ After I finished the design, I got four of my friends to wear the uniform, and we borrowed all the neighbors’ dogs, and we walked them down 5th avenue while handing out business cards. I got five customers that first day.”