A 91-year-old man presented with a cutaneous left abdominal mass. The mass was longstanding (over 5 years) and slow-growing. Examination revealed a violaceous, multinodular, and exophytic non-tender mass surrounded by patchy erythema.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSweet's syndrome (SS), or acute febrile neutrophilic dermatosis, characteristically presents with fever, dermal neutrophilic infiltrates, and neutrophilia. It typically manifests as tender erythematous plaques; however, various variants are documented, including bullous. Malignancy-associated Sweet's syndrome (MASS) can present as a paraneoplastic syndrome in those with established cancers or with undiagnosed malignancies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBehavioral variation abounds in nature. This variation is important for adaptation and speciation, but its molecular basis remains elusive. Here, we use a hybrid zone between two subspecies of songbirds that differ in migration - an ecologically important and taxonomically widespread behavior---to gain insight into this topic.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDetermining the forces that shape diversity in host-associated bacterial communities is critical to understanding the evolution and maintenance of metaorganisms. To gain deeper understanding of the role of host genetics in shaping gut microbial traits, we employed a powerful genetic mapping approach using inbred lines derived from the hybrid zone of two incipient house mouse species. Furthermore, we uniquely performed our analysis on microbial traits measured at the gut mucosal interface, which is in more direct contact with host cells and the immune system.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Young African American women have higher rates of sexually transmitted infections, including HIV, than those of young women of other racial and ethnic groups. Gender-, culture-, and age-specific interventions are needed to end the HIV epidemic. The Women's CoOp (WC) is an HIV risk-reduction intervention that is proven to be efficacious in various face-to-face formats.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Adolesc
December 2021
Introduction: South Africa has one of the highest incidences of HIV among adolescent girls and young women (AGW), ages 15-24, and recent research has focused on developing interventions for HIV prevention. However, the South African National Health Act requires those under 18 years of age to obtain a guardian's permission to participate in research. Limiting research enrolment to AGYW who can obtain guardian consent may lead to non-representative findings.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Dobzhansky-Muller (DM) model provides a widely accepted mechanism for the evolution of reproductive isolation: incompatible substitutions disrupt interactions between genes. To date, few candidate incompatibility genes have been identified, leaving the genes driving speciation mostly uncharacterized. The importance of interactions in the DM model suggests that gene coexpression networks provide a powerful framework to understand disrupted pathways associated with postzygotic isolation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBMC Public Health
August 2018
Background: Disparities in the prevalence of HIV persist in the southern United States, and young African American women have a disproportionate burden of HIV as compared with young women of other racial/ethnic backgrounds. As a result, engaging young African American women in the HIV care continuum through HIV testing is imperative. This study is designed to reach this key population at risk for HIV.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: South Africa remains the global epicentre of HIV infection, and adolescent women have the highest incidence of HIV in the country. South Africa also has high rates of alcohol and other drug (AOD) use, violence, and gender inequality. Violence converges with AOD use, gender inequities and other disparities, such as poverty, to increase sexual risk and poor educational attainment for adolescent women.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTwo subspecies of the house mouse, Mus musculus domesticus and Mus musculus musculus, meet in a narrow contact zone across Europe. Mice in the hybrid zone are highly admixed, representing the full range of mixed ancestry from the two subspecies. Given the distinct morphologies of these subspecies, these natural hybrids can be used for genomewide association mapping at sufficiently high resolution to directly infer candidate genes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNumerous loci of large effect have been shown to underlie phenotypic variation between species. However, loci with subtle effects are presumably more frequently involved in microevolutionary processes but have rarely been discovered. We explore the genetic basis of shape variation in the first upper molar of hybrid mice between and .
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The quality and limitations of digital slides are not fully known. We aimed to estimate intrapathologist discrepancy in detecting specific microscopic features on glass slides and digital slides created by scanning at ×20.
Methods: Hematoxylin and eosin and periodic acid-Schiff glass slides were digitized using the Mirax Scan (Carl Zeiss Inc.
Craniofacial shape differences between taxa have often been linked to environmental adaptation, e.g., new food sources, or have been studied in the context of domestication.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSelective BRAF inhibitors (BRAFi) yield objective responses in 50% of patients with metastatic BRAF V600E mutant melanoma. Adding an MEK inhibitor increases this response rate to 70%. Limited data are available on the outcomes of unresectable stage III patients, and it remains unclear whether BRAF-targeted therapy can be utilized as a neoadjuvant strategy.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRecent evidence suggests that natural selection operating on hosts to maintain their microbiome contributes to the emergence of new species, that is, the 'hologenomic basis of speciation'. Here we analyse the gut microbiota of two house mice subspecies, Mus musculus musculus and M. m.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMapping hybrid defects in contact zones between incipient species can identify genomic regions contributing to reproductive isolation and reveal genetic mechanisms of speciation. The house mouse features a rare combination of sophisticated genetic tools and natural hybrid zones between subspecies. Male hybrids often show reduced fertility, a common reproductive barrier between incipient species.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe identification of the genes involved in morphological variation in nature is still a major challenge. Here, we explore a new approach: we combine 178 samples from a natural hybrid zone between two subspecies of the house mouse (Mus musculus domesticus and Mus musculus musculus), and high coverage of the genome (~ 145K SNPs) to identify loci underlying craniofacial shape variation. Due to the long history of recombination in the hybrid zone, high mapping resolution is anticipated.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHybrid dysfunction, a common feature of reproductive barriers between species, is often caused by negative epistasis between loci ("Dobzhansky-Muller incompatibilities"). The nature and complexity of hybrid incompatibilities remain poorly understood because identifying interacting loci that affect complex phenotypes is difficult. With subspecies in the early stages of speciation, an array of genetic tools, and detailed knowledge of reproductive biology, house mice (Mus musculus) provide a model system for dissecting hybrid incompatibilities.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCan J Plast Surg
September 2012
A congenital granular cell tumour is rare, and presents in newborns as a mass arising from the alveolus. While its pathogenesis is unclear, it has no malignant potential and may, occasionally, spontaneously regress postpartum. Successful treatment usually consists of conservative simple excision.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBarriers to gene flow between naturally hybridizing taxa reveal the initial stages of speciation. Reduced hybrid fertility is a common feature of reproductive barriers separating recently diverged species. In house mice (Mus musculus), hybrid male sterility has been studied extensively using experimental crosses between subspecies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: Using gene expression profiling on frozen primary pancreatic endocrine tumors (PETs), we discovered RUNX1T1 as a leading candidate progression gene. This study was designed (1) to validate the differential expression of RUNX1T1 protein on independent test sets of metastatic and nonmetastatic PETs and (2) to determine if RUNX1T1 underexpression in primary tumors was predictive of liver metastases.
Methods: Immunohistochemical expression of RUNX1T1 protein was quantified using Allred scores on archival metastatic (n = 13) and nonmetastatic (n = 24) primary adult PET tissues using custom-designed tissue microarrays.
Burn survivors have described a type of pain, usually after wound healing, that has characteristics of neuropathic pain. This pain is not well treated with conventional medications. Pregabalin has had reported success in treating diabetic and post-herpetic neuropathic pain.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAlternative splicing, the combination of different exons to produce a variety of transcripts from a single gene, contributes enormously to transcriptome diversity in mammals, and the majority of genes encode alternatively spliced products. Previous research comparing mouse, rat and human has shown that a significant proportion of splice forms are not conserved across species, suggesting that alternative transcripts are an important source of evolutionary novelty. Here, we studied the evolution of alternative splicing in the early stages of species divergence in the house mouse.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGenetic variation in Avpr1a, the locus encoding the arginine vasopressin receptor 1A (V1aR), has been implicated in pair-bonding behavior in voles (genus Microtus) and humans, raising the possibility that this gene may contribute commonly to mating-system variation in mammals. In voles, differential expression of V1aR in the brain is associated with male partner-preference behavior in a comparison of a monogamous (Microtus ochrogaster) and promiscuous (Microtus montanus) species. This expression difference is correlated, in turn, with a difference in length of a 5' regulatory microsatellite in Avpr1a.
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