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Purpose Cancer care is undergoing a conceptual shift with the introduction of the principles of patient-centered care to support patients’ individual needs. These needs include those related to hospitality during cancer treatments. This paper aims to provide an extension of the supportive care framework by bringing in the hospitality approach inspired by the hotel industry. Method The “Lausanne Hospitality Model,” integrating hospitality into supportive care, was developed through an iterative process, combining expertise in supportive care and health services research, communication, and the hotel industry. Results This conceptual paper integrates hospitality and service sciences into the supportive care framework. The “Lausanne Hospitality Model” offers new insights into the notions of cancer journey, patient experience, services, and practices that may be involved when facilitating hospitality. While most concepts used in the model are based on prior research, they have not been combined previously. The model highlights the place of hospitality in the patient’s experience within cancer services and, by extension, its role in professional practice. Conclusion Practices involved in the delivery of cancer care need to reinforce the importance attributed to hospitality services, as they impact patients’ experiences. By integrating the hospitality perspective into healthcare delivery and supportive care, this paper addresses previously theoretically overlooked aspects that impact patients’ experiences during cancer care.

A group of 78 young employees in service and non-service professions reported 848 task related interactions at work over 1 week using a variant of the Rochester Interaction Record which measured emotion work requirements, emotional dissonance, and deviance. Multi-level analyses showed that dissonance was more likely in interactions with customers, whereas deviance, that is, the violation of display rules by acting out one's felt emotion, was more likely in co-worker interactions. Well-being in the interaction was lower (a) for interactions with emotion work requirements, (b) for dissonance, even after controlling for felt negative emotions, and (c) for deviance. Negative emotion displayed partially mediated the relationship between deviance and well-being. Regarding the relationship of more stable job related attitudes, psychosomatic complaints, and aggregated scores of social interactions, fewer effects were found than in questionnaire studies, which may be due to the fact that only interactions that lasted at least 10 minutes were assessed, as is customary in research with this instrument. Among the effects found, however, many involved proportions rather than frequency of interactions, which raises the possibility of balancing and legitimizing effects of non-stressful interactions.

The paramyxovirus nucleocapsid proteins (NPs) are relatively well conserved, except for the C-terminal 20% (or ca. 100 amino acids), referred to as the tail. We have examined whether this hypervariable tail is required for genome synthesis, both in vitro, where synthesis is predominantly from the input templates, and in vivo, where multiple rounds of amplification occur. In these viruses, genome synthesis and assembly of the nascent chain are coupled. We find that the tail is required in vivo but not in vitro. Closer examination of the in vivo system showed that the tailless NP could encapsidate the genome chain but that amplification did not occur. We interpret these results as indicating that the tail is not required for RNA assembly but is required for the template to function in RNA synthesis. Relatively small deletions within the conserved N-terminal 80% of the protein, on the other hand, rendered the protein nonfunctional in either system. The possible functions of the tail in RNA synthesis are discussed.

An antiserum to a peptide of the Tacaribe virus Z protein was used to determine whether this small Zn(2+)-binding protein was required for viral RNA synthesis in infected cell extracts. Specific immunodepletion of the extracts invariably reduced genome synthesis to near background levels, but strong effects on mRNA synthesis occurred only early in the infection or when mRNA synthesis was relatively weak. Our results suggest that the Z protein is required for both mRNA and genome synthesis, but in somewhat different manners.

The P gene of paramyxoviruses usually contains an alternate overlapping ORF coding for a short cysteine-rich domain called V. This domain was thought to be a common feature of these genes as it is present in ten paramyxoviruses. However, the V ORF region of the P gene of one strain of human parainfluenza-virus type 1 (isolated in 1957) was recently found to be closed by no less than 9 stop codons. To determine whether the absence of the V ORF here might be due to the long adaptation of this strain in culture, 3 other more recent isolates were examined. Small differences in the V region were found, but all had conserved the vast majority of the stop codons. Moreover, examination of most of the intercistronic regions of the PIV1 genome failed to uncover a cryptic V gene. The V ORF is then unlikely to be a common feature of paramyxovirus P genes.

The glucagon gene is specifically expressed in A cells of the pancreatic islets. We have previously identified three functional DNA control elements within the 5'-flanking sequence of the glucagon gene: an upstream promoter element (G1), responsible for the A-cell-specific expression, and two enhancer-like elements (G2 and G3). Mutations within G1 completely abolished the enhancer activities of G2 and G3. We show here that the loss of transcriptional activity is not due to an absence of binding of nuclear proteins to G2 or G3, but rather to an essential role of G1 to enable G2 and G3 to exert their effects at a distance. When juxtaposed to the TATA box, both enhancers are capable of inducing transcription as efficiently as when an intact G1 is present. However, the tandem arrangement of G2 plus G3 does not result in additional transcriptional activity compared with a single element. We conclude that G2 and G3 are capable of directly activating transcription but in a highly distance-dependent fashion and without cooperatively interacting. G1 may thus serve only as a tissue-specific relay, bringing together factors that bind to enhancers and the TATA box.

A protein from Arabidopsis thaliana (L.) Heynh. showing homology to animal proteins of the NaPi-1 family, involved in the transport of inorganic phosphate, chloride, glutamate and sialic acid, has been characterized. This protein, named ANTR2 (for anion transporters) was shown by chloroplast subfractionation to be localized to the plastid inner envelope in both A. thaliana and Spinacia oleracea (L.). Immunolocalization revealed that ANTR2 was expressed in the leaf mesophyll cells as well as in the developing embryo at the upturned-U stage. Five additional homologues of ANTR2 are found in the Arabidopsis genome, of which one was shown by green fluorescent protein (GFP) fusion to be also located in the chloroplast. All ANTR proteins share homology to the animal NaPi-1 family, as well as to other organic-anion transporters that are members of the Anion:Cation Symporter (ACS) family, and share the main features of transporters from this family, including the presence of 12 putative transmembrane domains and of a 7-amino acid motif in the fourth putative transmembrane domain. ANTR2 thus represent a novel protein of the plastid inner envelope that is likely to be involved in anion transport.

Mechanisms leading to subgenomic mRNA (sgmRNA) synthesis in coronaviruses are poorly understood but are known to involve a heptameric signaling motif, originally called the intergenic sequence. The intergenic sequence is the presumed crossover region (fusion site) for RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp) during discontinuous transcription, a process leading to sgmRNAs that are both 5′ and 3′ coterminal. In the bovine coronavirus, the major fusion site for synthesis of mRNA 5 ( GG UA G AC) does not conform to the canonical motif (UC[U,C]AAAC) at three positions (underlined), yet it lies just 14 nucleotides downstream from such a sequence (UCCAAAC). The infrequently used canonical sequence, by computer prediction, is buried within the stem of a stable hairpin (−17.2 kcal/mol). Here we document the existence of this stem by enzyme probing and examine its influence and that of neighboring sequences on the unusual choice of fusion sites by analyzing transcripts made in vivo from mutated defective interfering RNA constructs. We learned that (i) mutations that were predicted to unfold the stem-loop in various ways did not switch RdRp crossover to the upstream canonical site, (ii) a totally nonconforming downstream motif resulted in no measurable transcription from either site, (iii) the canonical upstream site does not function ectopically to lend competence to the downstream noncanonical site, and (iv) altering flanking sequences downstream of the downstream noncanonical motif in ways that diminish sequence similarity with the virus genome 5′ end caused a dramatic switch to the upstream canonical site. These results show that sequence elements downstream of the noncanonical site can dramatically influence the choice of fusion sites for synthesis of mRNA 5 and are interpreted as being most consistent with a mechanism of similarity-assisted RdRp strand switching during minus-strand synthesis.

Unlike some members of the family Bunyaviridae which contain ambisense genomes, all La Crosse virus reading frames are translated from antigenome sense mRNAs. Nevertheless, La Crosse virus genome sense mRNAs or anti-mRNAs are initiated from antigenome templates. These are characterized by the same range of capped, nontemplated sequences at their 5' ends as mRNAs, but their 3' ends are presumed to be heterogenous, as they were not seen on RNA blots. The anti-mRNAs are estimated to be 15 to 30 times less abundant than mRNAs, but remarkably, this ratio is similar to that of functional genome sense mRNAs made from other bona fide ambisense segments. A role for these anti-mRNAs during infection is unclear.