Project description:Most hospitalized preterm infants receive antibiotics (AB) in the first days of life to treat or prevent systemic infections. Short-term, early AB treatment may also prevent against the microbiota-dependent serious gut disorder, necrotising enterocolitis (NEC). However, it remains a challenge to predict or early detection of NEC in the first weeks of life and few diagnostic markers exist. Using preterm piglets as models for infants, we hypothesised that proteomic profiling could be used to identify new early plasma biomarkers of NEC with or without prior AB treatment. Preterm newborn pigs were treated with saline (CON) or antibiotics (ampicillin, gentamicin, and metronidazole), given enterally (ENT) or parenterally (PAR), and fed formula for four days to induce NEC. The gut was collected for scoring of NEC lesions and blood was collected for haematology and plasma proteomics
Project description:Threatened preterm labour (TPTL) is the most common condition that requires hospitalisation during pregnancy. Most of these symptomatic women continue their pregnancies to term while only an estimated 5% will deliver a premature baby within ten days. Peripheral blood leukocytes are exposed to “activating signals” from reproductive tissues and may indicate the impending onset of labour. Objectives: 1) To investigate differential leukocyte gene expression in women with TPTL; and 2) to develop a gene signature to predict preterm birth (PTB) within 48 hours in symptomatic women. Design, Setting and Participants: Women clinically diagnosed with TPTL were recruited. Peripheral blood was obtained at point of admission prior to medical treatments. mRNA was extracted and microarrays (Affymetrix U133 Plus 2.0) were utilised to determine differential gene expressions between women who did (n=48) and did not (n=106) have a preterm delivery within 48 hours of hospital admission. Results: There were 394 significantly differentially expressed genes (FDR<0.05, Limma); 22 out of 30 genes chosen for qRT-PCR validation were differentially expressed (p<0.05). Total 154; 48 delivered within 48 hours of hospital admission; 106 did not deliver within 48 hours
Project description:Necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC), a severe gut disorder in preterm infants, is difficult to predict due to poor specificity and sensitivity of clinical signs and biomarkers. Using preterm piglets as a model, we hypothesized that early development of NEC affects blood gene expression, potentially related to early systemic immune responses. In this animal model, variable severity of gut NEC lesions were detected in 5d-old piglets with limited clinical signs. NEC (n=20) and control piglets (CON, n=19) were analyzed for whole blood transcriptome, revealing 344 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) between NEC and CON piglets. Co-expression network analyses and qPCR suggested AOAH, FKBP5, PAK2 as three NEC-specific genes associated with severe gut lesions. These results suggest that whole blood gene expressions are affected in preterm piglets when clinical symptoms of NEC are minimal. Blood transcriptome may be a novel tool to identify early biomarkers of NEC.
Project description:Newborn screening (NBS) is a global initiative of systematic testing at birth to identify babies with pre-defined severe but treatable conditions. With a simple blood test, rare genetic conditions can be easily detected, and the early start of transformative treatment will help avoid severe disabilities and increase the quality of life.
Baby Detect Project is an innovative NBS program using a panel of target sequencing that aims to identify 126 treatable severe early onset genetic diseases at birth caused by 361 genes. The list of diseases has been established in close collaboration with the Paediatricians of the University Hospital in Liege. The investigators use dedicated dried blood spots collected between the first day and 28 days of life of babies, after a consent sign by parents.
Project description:Intestinal microbiota colonization is important for intestinal development and health of preterm infants, especially those with extremely low birth weight. Recent studies indicated for a dynamic crosstalk between that gut microbiota and DNA methylome of host intestinal cells. Thereby, we sought to determine the epigenomic and metagenomic consequences of suppression of microbiota colonization in the intestine of preterm neonates to gain insights into biological pathways that shape the interface between the gut microbiota and the preterm intestinal cells. We examined 14 preterm piglets by comparing the conventional preterm neonates with those ones treated with oral antibiotics for genome wide DNA methylation and 16S rDNA microbiome. Our results demonstrated an extensive genome-wide DNA methylation changes in response to the suppression of intestinal microbe colonization, especially genes involved in neonatal immune response signaling and glycol-metabolism pathways were identified. Our study highlights several key genes that might predispose preterm neonates to NEC risk due to their key roles involved in the immune-metabolic networks. Our study not only provided rich omic-data to interpret molecular program in relation with microbiota-associated methylome-proteome network changes, but also confer clinical usage of key gene markers for potential early diagnostics of NEC of preterm neonates.
Project description:DNA methylation (DNAm) plays a determining role in neural cell fate and provides a molecular link between early life stress and life-course neuropsychiatric disease. Preterm birth is a profound environmental stressor that is closely associated with alterations in connectivity of neural systems and long-term neuropsychiatric impairment. The aims of this study were to examine the relationship between preterm birth and DNAm and to investigate factors that contribute to variance in DNAm. DNA was collected from preterm infants (birth < 32 weeks’ gestation) and healthy controls (birth > 37 weeks), and a genome-wide analysis of DNAm was performed; diffusion MRI (dMRI) data were acquired from the preterm group. The major fasciculi were segmented, and fractional anisotropy, mean diffusivity and tract shape were calculated. Principal components analysis was used to investigate the contribution of MRI features and key clinical variables to variance in DNAm. Differentially methylated regions were found within 25 gene bodies and 61 promoters of protein-coding genes in preterm infants compared with controls; 10 of these are associated with neural development or function. Differences detected in the array were validated with pyrosequencing. Ninety-five percent of the variance in DNAm in preterm infants was explained by 23 principal components (PC); corticospinal tract shape associated with 6th PC, and gender and early nutritional exposure associated with the 7th PC. Preterm birth is associated with alterations in the methylome at sites that influence neural development and function. The differentially methylated regions identified provide several promising candidate genes for understanding the genetic/epigenetic basis of preterm brain injury.
Project description:91 preterm infant gut metaproteomes measured in technical duplicate using an eleven salt pulse 2D-LC-MS/MS method. Samples represent 17 preterm infants over the first several weeks of life, of which 6 preterm infants eventually developed necrotizing enterocolitis.
Project description:Bacterial infections are a major cause of mortality in preterm babies, yet our understanding of early-life disease-associated immune dysregulation remains limited. Here, we combined multi-parameter flow cytometry, single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNAseq) and targeted plasma analysis to prospectively and longitudinally profile blood from very preterm babies (<32 weeks gestation) across episodes of invasive bacterial infection (sepsis). We identified a dynamically changing peripheral blood immune signature of sepsis, including lymphopenia, reduced dendritic cell frequencies and monocyte HLA-DR expression, which characterized sepsis even when the common clinical marker of inflammation, C-reactive protein (CRP) was not elevated. Furthermore, scRNAseq showed upregulation of amphiregulin in different leukocyte populations during sepsis, which we validated as a plasma analyte that correlated with clinical signs of disease, even when CRP was normal. This study provides new insights into immune pathways associated with early-life sepsis and identifies potential immune analytes as diagnostic adjuncts for sepsis to guide targeted antibiotic prescribing.