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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antibiotics

Poop substitute effective vs C. diff

A pill derived from human feces can effectively ward off Clostridium difficile diarrhea, according to the results of a clinical trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Clinical microbiologist/infectious disease specialist Colleen Kraft and Emory patients contributed to the Phase III, 182 patient study, which was sponsored by Seres Therapeutics. Kraft is associate chief medical officer at Emory University Hospital and 2022 president-elect of the American Society for Microbiology.

Colleen Kraft, MD

Seres’ pill is an alternative to fecal microbiota transplant (FMT), a treatment for C.difficile that is both well-established and difficult to standardize. Everyone is intimately familiar with the material necessary for FMT, but its microbial components vary with the individual donor, diet and time. That presents some inconsistency and risk that has delayed FDA approval for the procedure.

Moving toward an “off the shelf” product, Seres takes stool from prescreened donors and treats the material with ethanol, killing some microbes and leaving behind bacterial spores that can compete for intestinal real estate with C. difficile. A previous study of Seres’ pill was unsuccessful, inspiring the headline “Sham poo washes out.” More information about the newer study and the company’s plans are in this Science article.

C. difficile colonization sometimes occurs after antibiotics deplete healthier forms of intestinal bacteria. Kraft and colleagues at Emory have been investigating whether FMT can prevent colonization by antibiotic-resistant bacteria in kidney transplant patients, who have (deliberately) dampened immune systems and need to take antibiotics.

Posted on January 26, 2022 by Quinn Eastman in Uncategorized Leave a comment

New animal model for elimination of latent TB

The significance of a recent Tulane/Yerkes study on eradicating latent tuberculosis in non-human primates may not be apparent at first glance. After all, it used the same antibiotic regimen (isoniazid + rifapentine) that is recommended by the CDC for human use.

But consider whether someone who was exposed to TB in childhood might still have it in their lungs somewhere. It’s difficult to know if treatments get rid of the bacteria completely.

“The antibiotic treatment we used for this study is a new, shorter regimen the CDC recommends for treating humans with latent tuberculosis, but we did not have direct evidence for whether it completely clears latent infection,” says Yerkes/Emory Vaccine Center researcher Jyothi Rengarajan, who was co-principal investigator along with Deepak Kaushal of Tulane. “Our experimental study in macaques showing almost complete sterilization of bacteria after treatment suggests this three-month regimen sterilizes humans as well.”

In an editorial in the same journal, CDC and Johns Hopkins experts call the results “dramatic” and say application of the drug regimen “could presage a major step forward in TB prevention and control.” Read more

Posted on January 15, 2020 by Quinn Eastman in Immunology Leave a comment

FMT microbial transplant for C diff gaining acceptance

In February, the Infectious Diseases Society of America issued new guidelines for fighting Clostridium difficile, the hardy bacterium that can cause life-threatening diarrhea and whose dominance is sometimes a consequence of antibiotic treatment. The guidelines recommend for the first time that FMT (fecal microbiota transplant) be considered for individuals who have repeatedly failed standard antibiotics.

In a nice coincidence, Emory FMT specialists Colleen Kraft and Tanvi Dhere recently published a look at their clinical outcomes with C diff going back to 2012, in Clinical Infectious Diseases. They report 95 percent of patients (122/128) indicated they would undergo FMT again and 70 percent of the 122 said they would prefer FMT to antibiotics as initial treatment if they were to have a recurrence. Read more

Posted on February 23, 2018 by Quinn Eastman in Immunology Leave a comment

Nudging physician behavior on antibiotic orders

Part of the problem of antibiotic resistance involves physicians’ habits. Doctors are used to prescribing antibiotics in certain situations, even when they may be inappropriate or when alternatives may be best. However, they may be susceptible to “nudges”, even if health care organization policies don’t formally restrict their choices. Former White House regulatory policy guru Cass Sunstein has written several books on this concept.

In March 2015, MD/PhD student Kira Newman and colleagues published a study in Journal of General Internal Medicine that has some bearing on this idea, although it doesn’t address antibiotic resistance directly:

Yelp for Prescribers: a Quasi-Experimental Study of Providing Antibiotic Cost Data and Prescription of High-Cost Antibiotics in an Academic and Tertiary Care Hospital.

The authors describe a shift involving the Emory University hospital electronic health record and order entry system. When a patient has systemic or urinary tract bacterial infection, the system shows a table of antibiotic sensitivity data alongside blood or urine culture results.

Beginning in May 2010, cost category data for antibiotics were added. Explicit numbers were not included – too complicated. Instead, the information was coded in terms of $ to $$$$. For the year after the change, the authors report a 31 percent reduction in average cost per unit of antibiotics prescribed. Read more

Posted on November 3, 2015 by Quinn Eastman in Uncategorized 1 Comment

Odd couples and persistence

When doctors treat disease-causing bacteria with antibiotics, a few bacteria can survive even if they do not have a resistance gene that defends them from the antibiotic. These rare, slow-growing or hibernating cells are called “persisters.”

Microbiologists see understanding persistence as a key to fighting antibiotic resistance and possibly finding new antibiotics. Persistence appears to be regulated by constantly antagonistic pairs of proteins called toxin-antitoxins.

Basically, the toxin’s job is to slow down bacterial growth by interfering with protein production, and the antitoxin’s job is to restrain the toxin until stress triggers a retreat by the antitoxin. Some toxins chew up protein-encoding RNA messages docked at ribosomes, but there are a variety of mechanisms. The genomes of disease-causing bacteria are chock full of these battling odd couples, yet not much was known about how they work in the context of persistence.

Biochemist Christine Dunham reports that several laboratories recently published papers directly implicating toxin-antitoxin complexes in both persistence and biofilm formation. Her laboratory has been delving into how the parts of various toxin-antitoxin complexes interact.HigBA smaller

BCDB graduate student Marc Schureck and colleagues have determined the structure of a complex of HigBA toxin-antitoxin proteins from Proteus vulgaris bacteria via X-ray crystallography. The results were recently published in Journal of Biological Chemistry.

While Proteus vulgaris is known for causing urinary tract and wound infections, the HigBA toxin-antitoxin pair is also found in several other disease-causing bacteria such as V. cholera, P. aeruginosa, M. tuberculosis, S. pneumoniae etc.

“We have been directly comparing toxin-antitoxin systems in E. coli, Proteus and M. tuberculosis to see if there are commonalities and differences,” Dunham says.

The P. vulgaris HigBA structure is distinctive because the antitoxin HigA does not wrap around and mask the active site of HigB, which has been seen in other toxin-antitoxin systems. Still, HigA clings onto HigB in a way that prevents it from jamming itself into the ribosome.

Posted on December 10, 2013 by Quinn Eastman in Uncategorized Leave a comment

From the genetic code to new antibiotics

Biochemist Christine Dunham and her colleagues have a new paper in PNAS illuminating a long-standing puzzle concerning ribosomes, the factories inside cells that produce proteins.

Ribosomes are where the genetic code “happens,” because they are the workshops where messenger RNA is read out and proteins are assembled piece by piece. As a postdoc, Dunham contributed to Nobel Prize-winning work determining the molecular structure of the ribosome with mentor Venki Ramakrishnan.

Ribosomes are the workshops for protein synthesis and the targets of several antibiotics

The puzzle is this: how messenger RNA can be faithfully and precisely translated, when the interactions that hold RNA base pairs (A-U and G-C) together are not strong enough. There is enough “wobble” in RNA base pairing such that transfer RNAs that don’t match all three letters on the messenger RNA can still fit.

Read more

Posted on June 17, 2013 by Quinn Eastman in Uncategorized Leave a comment