Project description:This project investigates the impact of different delivery modes and labor on maternal and neonatal health by analyzing 40 participants, including 16 spontaneous vaginal deliveries (VD), 16 prelabor cesarean deliveries (CS), and 8 intrapartum cesarean sections (Intra_CS). Using label-free proteomics and untargeted metabolomics, both amniotic fluid and cord blood samples were analyzed respectively to identify variations in protein and metabolite profiles associated with the mode of delivery. The study aims to uncover biological pathways influenced by labor and delivery mode, providing insights into how these factors shape maternal and neonatal outcomes, with implications for improving perinatal care and long-term health strategies.
Project description:The rapidly increasing number of engineered nanoparticles (NPs), and products containing NPs, raises concerns for human exposure and safety. With this increasing, and ever changing, catalogue of NPs it is becoming more difficult to adequately assess the toxic potential of new materials in a timely fashion. It is therefore important to develop methods which can provide high-throughput screening of biological responses. The use of omics technologies, including metabolomics, can play a vital role in this process by providing relatively fast, comprehensive, and cost-effective assessment of cellular responses. These techniques thus provide the opportunity to identify specific toxicity pathways and to generate hypotheses on how to reduce or abolish toxicity.We have used untargeted metabolome analysis to determine differentially expressed metabolites in human lung epithelial cells (A549) exposed to copper oxide nanoparticles (CuO NPs). Toxicity hypotheses were then generated based on the affected pathways, and critically tested using more conventional biochemical and cellular assays. CuO NPs induced regulation of metabolites involved in oxidative stress, hypertonic stress, and apoptosis. The involvement of oxidative stress was clarified more easily than apoptosis, which involved control experiments to confirm specific metabolites that could be used as standard markers for apoptosis; based on this we tentatively propose methylnicotinamide as a generic metabolic marker for apoptosis.Our findings are well aligned with the current literature on CuO NP toxicity. We thus believe that untargeted metabolomics profiling is a suitable tool for NP toxicity screening and hypothesis generation.
Project description:In this study, small RNAs were isolated from individual donations of eight forensically relevant biological fluids (blood, semen, vaginal fluid, menstrual blood, saliva, urine, feces, and perspiration) and subjected to next generation sequencing using the Illumina® Hi-Seq platform. Sequencing reads were aligned and annotated against miRbase release 21, resulting in a list of miRNAs and their relative expression levels for each sample analyzed. Body fluids with high bacterial loads (vaginal fluid, saliva, and feces) yielded relatively low annotated miRNA counts, likely due to oversaturation of small RNAs from the endogenous bacteria. Both body-fluid specific and potential normalization miRNAs were identified for further analysis as potential body fluid identification tools for each body fluid. 32 samples - 3-5 replicates of each human biological fluid: venous blood, urine, semen (normal and vasectomized), vaginal secretions, menstrual secretions, perspiration, feces, saliva
Project description:Genome-wide expression profiling of four kinds of body fluid samples (blood, saliva, semen and vaginal swab). The purpose of the present study was selection of specific mRNA markers for identification of the four body fluids. Results provide important information about gene expression level of each body fluid for forensic science. Total RNAs isolated from four kinds of body fluid samples (blood, saliva, semen and vaginal swab) obtained from Korean volunteers