Warren symposium follows legacy of geneticist giant

If we want to understand how the brain creates memories, and how genetic disorders distort the brain’s machinery, then the fragile X gene is an ideal place to start. That’s why the Stephen T. Warren Memorial Symposium, taking place November 28-29 at Emory, will be a significant event for those interested in neuroscience and genetics. Stephen T. Warren, 1953-2021 Warren, the founding chair of Emory’s Department of Human Genetics, led an international team that discovered Read more

Mutations in V-ATPase proton pump implicated in epilepsy syndrome

Why and how disrupting V-ATPase function leads to epilepsy, researchers are just starting to figure Read more

Tracing the start of COVID-19 in GA

At a time when COVID-19 appears to be receding in much of Georgia, it’s worth revisiting the start of the pandemic in early 2020. Emory virologist Anne Piantadosi and colleagues have a paper in Viral Evolution on the earliest SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequences detected in Georgia. Analyzing relationships between those virus sequences and samples from other states and countries can give us an idea about where the first COVID-19 infections in Georgia came from. We can draw Read more
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fecal microbial transplant

Measuring microbiome disruption

How should doctors measure how messed up someone’s intestinal microbiome is?

This is the topic of a recent paper in American Journal of Infection Control from Colleen Kraft and colleagues from Emory and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The corresponding author is epidemiologist Alison Laufer Halpin at the CDC.

A “microbiome disruption index” could inform decisions on antibiotic stewardship, where a patient should be treated or interventions such as fecal microbial transplant (link to 2014 Emory Medicine article) or oral probiotic capsules.

What the authors are moving towards is similar to Shannon’s index, which ecologists use to measure diversity of species. Another way to think about it is like the Gini coefficient, a measure of economic inequality in a country. If there are many kinds of bacteria living in someone’s body, the disruption index should be low. If there is just one dominant type of bacteria, the disruption index should be high.

In the paper, the authors examined samples from eight patients in a long-term acute care hospital (Wesley Woods) who had recently developed diarrhea. Using DNA sequencing, they determined what types of bacteria were present in patients’ stool. The patients’ samples were compared with those from two fecal microbial transplant donors. Read more

Posted on March 21, 2016 by Quinn Eastman in Immunology, Uncategorized Leave a comment