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UNLABELLED: The 2005 consensus proposal for the classification of hepatitis C virus (HCV) presented an agreed and uniform nomenclature for HCV variants and the criteria for their assignment into genotypes and subtypes. Since its publication, the available dataset of HCV sequences has vastly expanded through advancement in nucleotide sequencing technologies and an increasing focus on the role of HCV genetic variation in disease and treatment outcomes. The current study represents a major update to the previous consensus HCV classification, incorporating additional sequence information derived from over 1,300 (near-)complete genome sequences of HCV available on public databases in May 2013. Analysis resolved several nomenclature conflicts between genotype designations and using consensus criteria created a classification of HCV into seven confirmed genotypes and 67 subtypes. There are 21 additional complete coding region sequences of unassigned subtype. The study additionally describes the development of a Web resource hosted by the International Committee for Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV) that maintains and regularly updates tables of reference isolates, accession numbers, and annotated alignments (http://talk.ictvonline.org/links/hcv/hcv-classification.htm). The Flaviviridae Study Group urges those who need to check or propose new genotypes or subtypes of HCV to contact the Study Group in advance of publication to avoid nomenclature conflicts appearing in the literature. While the criteria for assigning genotypes and subtypes remain unchanged from previous consensus proposals, changes are proposed in the assignment of provisional subtypes, subtype numbering beyond "w," and the nomenclature of intergenotypic recombinant.CONCLUSION: This study represents an important reference point for the consensus classification of HCV variants that will be of value to researchers working in clinical and basic science fields.

Aritha van Herk's well-written and fast paced Mavericks provides an excellent introduction to Alberta. Served up without footnotes, Mavericks is not history, at least in the academic sense. What Aritha van Herk, a professor of English at the University of Calgary, provides instead is a fascinating personal view of Alberta's past. It contains valuable insights into how many Albertans view themselves and describes particularly well many Albertans' views about their relationship with the rest of Canada. The first chapter, "Aggravating, Awful, Awkward, Awesome Alberta," is all about the Albertan attitude. What propels the book, what glues it together, is an intense animosity toward what the author terms the "Centre," undoubtedly Ontario, and most definitely Ottawa, the federal capital, and Toronto, Canada's financial capital. At the outset she declares: "It's the Centre we hate." Throughout the book she decries "the West's position as colonial property, to be traded and exploited." Chronology determines the form of the next nine chapters which clearly review the geological background of the province; First Peoples; early European visitors; the arrival of the Mounties, ranchers, settlers, then politicians. Four final chapters review other topics: Alberta's two largest cities, Calgary and Edmonton; the history of women; and Alberta's twentieth-century culture and society. The author compares Albertans to mavericks, range calves without owners, individuals resistant "to being caught, owned, herded, taxed, or identified." Yet in her political chapters she confesses her confusion as to why the tough, hard to intimidate Albertans often behave "like a herd of lemmings," electing one party governments. Van Herk, one of Alberta's best novelists, regales the reader with well-crafted word pictures. Tightly she describes the political philosophy of the transplanted American, Henry Wise Wood, an important Alberta farm leader: "He maintained that the world was divided into nasties an