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

ulcerative colitis

First (and massive) whole-genome study of IBD in African Americans

In African Americans, the genetic risk landscape for inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is very different from that of people with European ancestry, according to results of the first whole-genome study of IBD in African Americans. The authors say that future clinical research on IBD needs to take ancestry into account.

Findings of the multi-center study, which analyzed the whole genomes of more than 1,700 affected individuals with Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis and more than 1,600 controls, were published on February 17 in the American Journal of Human Genetics.

As part of their analysis, the researchers developed an algorithm that corrects for ancestry when calculating an IBD polygenic risk score. Polygenic risk scores are tools for calculating gene-based risk for a disease, which are used for IBD as well as other complex conditions such as coronary artery disease.

“Even though the disease destination looks the same, the populations look very different, in terms of what specific genes contribute to risk for IBD,” says lead author Subra Kugathasan, MD. “It shows that you can’t develop a polygenic risk score based on one population and apply it to another.”

Kugathasan is scientific director of the pediatric IBD program and director of the Children’s Center for Transplantation and Immune-mediated Disorders at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, as well as Marcus professor of pediatrics and human genetics at Emory University School of Medicine.

The first author of the paper is geneticist Hari Somineni, PhD, who earned his doctorate working with Kugathasan at Emory, and is now working at Goldfinch Bio in Massachusetts.

The primary sites to recruit study participants were Emory, Cedars-Sinai and Rutgers, along with Johns Hopkins and Washington University at Saint Louis. Along with Kugathasan, the co-senior authors and co-organizers of the study were Steven Brant, MD from Rutgers and Dermot McGovern, MD, PhD from Cedars-Sinai.

“One of our goals in treating IBD is to move toward a more personalized approach,” says McGovern, the Joshua L. and Lisa Z. Greer Chair in Inflammatory Bowel Disease Genetics at Cedars-Sinai. “Deciphering the genetic architecture is an important part of this effort. Studies such as this one are vital to ensure that diverse populations, including African-Americans, benefit from the tremendous advances promised by genomic medicine.”

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Where it hurts matters in the gut

What part of the intestine is problematic matters more than inflammatory bowel disease subtype (Crohn’s disease vs ulcerative colitis), when it comes to genetic activity signatures in pediatric IBD.

Suresh Venkateswaran and Subra Kugathasan in the lab

That’s the takeaway message for a recent paper in Cellular and Molecular Gastroenterology and Hepatology (the PDF is open access) from gastroenterologist Subra Kugathasan and colleagues. His team has been studying risk factors in pediatric IBD that could predict whether a child will experience complications requiring surgery.

Kugathasan is professor of pediatrics and human genetics at Emory University School of Medicine and scientific director of the pediatric IBD program at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. He is also director of the Children’s Center for Transplantation and Immune-mediated Disorders.

“This study has demonstrated that tissue samples from the ileum and rectum of CD patients show higher molecular level differences, whereas in tissue samples from two different patients with the same type of disease, the molecular differences are low,” Kugathasan says. “This was an important question to answer, since IBD can be localized to one area, and the treatment responses can vary and can be tailored to a localized area if this knowledge is well known.”

Research associate Suresh Venkateswaran, PhD, is the first author on the CMGH paper.

“We see that the differences are not connected to genomic variations,” he says. “Instead, they may be caused by non-genetic factors which are specific to each location and disease sub-type of the patient.”

These findings have implications for other study designs involving molecular profiling of IBD patients. The authors believe the findings will be important for future design of locally acting drugs.

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Starvation signals control intestinal inflammation in mice

Intestinal inflammation in mice can be dampened by giving them a diet restricted in amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, researchers have found. The results were published online by Nature on Wednesday, March 16.

The findings highlight an ancient connection between nutrient availability and control of inflammation. They also suggest that a low protein diet — or drugs that mimic its effects on immune cells — could be tools for the treatment of inflammatory bowel diseases, such as Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis.

The research team, led by Emory Vaccine Center immunologist Bali Pulendran, discovered that mice lacking the amino acid sensor GCN2 are more sensitive to the chemical irritant DSS (dextran sodium sulfate), often used to model colitis in animals. This line of research grew out of the discovery by Pulendran and colleagues that GCN2 is pivotal for induction of immunity to the yellow fever vaccine.

“It is well known that the immune system can detect and respond to pathogens, but these results highlight its capacity to sense and adapt to environmental changes, such as nutritional starvation, which cause cellular stress,” he says.

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Providing the potent part of probiotics

A Emory News item on a helpful part of the microbiome focuses on how the same type of bacteria – lactobacilli – activates the same ancient signaling pathway in intestinal cells in both insects and mammals. It continues a line of research from Rheinallt Jones and Andrew Neish on how beneficial bacteria stimulate wound healing by activating ROS (reactive oxygen species).

Asma Nusrat, MD

A idea behind this research is: if we know what parts of the bacteria stimulate healing, perhaps doctors can deliver that material, or something very close, to patients directly to treat intestinal diseases such as Crohn’s or ulcerative colitis.

This idea has advanced experimentally, as demonstrated by two papers from Jones and Neish’s frequent collaborator, Asma Nusrat, who recently moved from Emory to the University of Michigan. This team had shown that a protein produced by human intestinal cells called annexin A1 activates ROS, acting through the same N-formyl peptide receptors that bacteria do.

Nusrat told me Friday her team began investigating annexins a decade ago at Emory, and it was fortuitous that Neish was working on beneficial bacteria right down the hall, since it is now apparent that annexin A1 and the bacteria are activating the same molecular signals. (Did you know there is an entire conference devoted to annexins? I didn’t until a few days ago.)

In a second Journal of Clinical Investigation paper published this February, Nusrat and her colleagues show that intestinal cells release vesicles containing annexin A1 following injury. The wound closure-promoting effects of these vesicles can be mimicked with nanoparticles containing annexin A1. The nanoparticles incorporate a form of collagen, which targets them to injured intestinal tissue. Read more

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