Project description:Introduction Monitoring disease activity in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is essential for guiding therapy and preventing irreversible tissue damage. Colonoscopy, although the gold standard, is invasive and unsuitable for frequent monitoring, while fecal calprotectin lacks accuracy within its diagnostic gray zone (fecal calprotectin 100–250 µg/g). Stool proteomics offers a non-invasive alternative by directly capturing molecular signatures of intestinal inflammation. We conducted a proof-of-concept study to determine whether stool-derived peptides can accurately classify IBD activity (Active vs Remission) using a fully unbiased and reproducible nested cross-validation machine-learning framework. Methods A total of 174 stool samples from IBD patients were collected and profiled using SWATH-DIA mass spectrometry. Feature selection was performed within the training loops only (Boruta, LASSO, RFE) across repeated subsampling, retaining peptides consistently identified in ≥70 % of runs. Stable features were used to train four classifiers (GLMNet, SVM-Radial, SVM-Linear, Naïve Bayes) under inner 5-fold tuning. Outer test folds provided fully unseen evaluation, and model performance was additionally assessed exclusively on gray zone samples extracted from the outer test splits to quantify diagnostic resolution in this clinically challenging subgroup. Results Nested cross-validation identified a consensus panel of nine stool-derived peptides from five proteins. Across candidate classifiers, performance was broadly similar, with GLMNet consistently achieving the best trade-off between metrics. For GLMNet, outer-fold mean AUC was 0.93 and balanced accuracy 0.88, with specificity 0.94, sensitivity 0.82, and F1-score 0.85; close agreement between inner- and outer-fold metrics indicated minimal overfitting. Approximately half of the misclassified test patients were shared with the other models, suggesting intrinsically ambiguous cases rather than GLMNet-specific errors. Within the calprotectin gray zone subgroup (n = 34), GLMNet maintained good performance (accuracy 0.76, balanced accuracy 0.78, F1 0.79, AUC 0.80), confirming that the peptide signature remains informative in this diagnostically challenging range. SHAP and correlation analyses confirmed directionally consistent, largely non-redundant peptide contributions, and network analysis showed that the underlying proteins participate in related but distinct inflammatory pathways. Conclusions A stool-based multi-peptide signature, evaluated with a rigorously nested, leakage-free machine-learning framework, can reliably classify IBD activity and retain discriminative power within the gray zone. This biologically interpretable five-protein panel provides a strong basis for targeted mass-spectrometry assay development and prospective validation as a non-invasive tool for personalized IBD monitoring.
Project description:Fecal samples (n=52) of a cohort of IBD patients were collected before and after 14 weeks of treatment with three different biologics. Clinical disease activity scores were used to determine the clinical response and remission. Fecal metaproteomes of remitting patients (n=12) and of non-remitting patients (n=12) were compared before treatment and changes within both groups were assessed over sampling time to identify functional changes and potential human and microbial biomarkers. (2 patients were excluded from finala analyses as the started the therapy in a remitting disease state.)
Project description:Human and rat stool sample Data was acquired using a Bruker Daltonics maXis Impact and C18 RP-UHPLC. Positive polarity acquisition of LC-MS/MS.
Project description:MJ2.1 Metabolomics analysis of P70 and P91 stool samples - Data was acquired using a Bruker Daltonics maXis Impact and C18 RP-UHPLC. Positive polarity acquisition of LC-MS/MS.
Project description:Cardioviruses are a genus of picornaviruses that cause severe illnesses in rodents, but little is known about the prevalence, diversity, or spectrum of disease of such agents among humans. We report the identification of a group of human cardioviruses that have been detected and cloned directly from patient specimens (Chiu and DeRisi, et al, PNAS, 2008). This series includes 9 arrays (both raw and normalized data) used to detect cardioviruses in human respiratory and stool specimens. The arrays employed here are capable of pan-viral detection (Wang and DeRisi, et al., PNAS, 2002). Keywords: viral detection, cardiovirus, TMEV, gastroenteritis The series includes 3 arrays from respiratory samples and 6 arrays from stool samples. Among the 3 arrays from respiratory sample, 1 array has a signature for an adenovirus, 1 array has a signature for human metapneumovirus, and 1 array has a signature for cardiovirus UC1 (see Chiu and DeRisi, et al., PNAS, in 2008). All 6 arrays from stool samples are cardiovirus-positive; some show evidence of dual infection with other gastroenteritis viruses (i.e. norovirus, rotavirus, etc.). Data in Sample records fed to E-Predict (Urisman, et al, Genome Biology, 2005) E-Predict normalization metrics Array Normalization: Sum E-Matrix Normalization: Quadratic Distance Metric: Pearson Uncentered
Project description:Longitudinal analysis of Salmonella typhimurium mRNA from superspeader mouse cecal content and stool compared to in vitro Salmonella typhimurium mRNA.
Project description:Antibiotics (Abx) are critical in modern medicine but can induce intestinal dysbiosis, exacerbate inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD), and disrupt the gut microbiome. Moreover, Abx treatment was reported as a significant risk factor for developing IBD, yet the underlying mechanisms remain unknown. Here, we employed metagenomics and metaproteomics to investigate the impact of Abx treatment on gut microbiota composition and activity in non-IBD, pouchitis, and ulcerative colitis (UC) patients. The combined analysis revealed distinct microbiome profiles for each group and found that the metaproteomes are more susceptible to Abx-induced changes than metagenomes. Alpha diversity decreased across all cohorts during Abx treatment, with pouchitis and UC patients exhibiting dysbiosis before treatment. Taxonomic shifts, including blooms of Proteobacteria and Actinobacteria, and reductions in microbial pathway abundances were more pronounced in IBD patients. Proteomic analysis revealed an elevated abundance of host pancreatic proteases, particularly in non-IBD patients, and during Antibiotic treatment, correlating with increased proteolytic activity and impaired gut barrier function. Functional assays confirm differential fecal proteolytic activity, suggesting that bacterial protease inhibitors, which are significantly depleted during Abx treatment, regulate proteolysis and thereby maintain delicate homeostasis in the gut. Overall, our findings suggest that Abx treatment disrupts the balance between bacterial protease inhibitors and host proteases, contributing to inflammation and gut barrier disruption. This work underscores the importance of understanding Abx-induced proteolytic shifts in the context of IBD and highlights the utility of metaproteomics in elucidating host-microbiome interactions. Future research should investigate the molecular mechanisms underlying the abundance and activity of bacterial protease inhibitors, as well as their impact on gut health.
Project description:Quantification of the human S100A8/S100A9 tetrameric protein complex in stool, referred to as fecal calprotectin, is an extensively validated biomarker supporting the diagnosis and management of gastrointestinal diseases1,2. The quaternary protein structures (called configuration here) of S100A8 and S100A9 and their biological function in the human intestine is unknown. This study unravels a diagnostic value for fecal S100A9 detection in IBD and identifies pleiotropic inflammatory mechanisms of S100A8 and S100A9 homodimers in the intestine.