we describe several corollaries of the littlewood-richardson refinements, including a method for multiplying two schur functions with different numbers of variables and expanding the result as a sum of key polynomials. we use interactions between schur functions and quasisymmetric schur functions to prove a conjecture of bergeron and reutenauer. we show that their conjectured basis is indeed a basis for the quotient ring of quasisymmetric functions by symmetric functions, which also provides a combinatorial proof of garsia and wallach's results about the freeness and dimension of qsym/sym. this is joint work with aaron lauve.