Wednesday, October 5, 2016

Chronic Wound Mycobiome

A new paper has just come out in mBio, and it represents an exploration of the fungi associated with chronic foot wounds in diabetic patients. This paper represents the last project for which I did benchwork before becoming all 'computational' all the time! I designed the approach for using MiSeq to sequence fungal ITS1 (which included designing and testing new primers specific for the platform) and executed the benchwork along with the first round of computational analyses. I appreciate Michael Loesche and Lindsay Kalan picking it up and performing a lot of necessary work to properly finish it off after I moved on from my position in the Grice Lab at the University of Pennsylvania.

The major finding was that certain aspects of the 'mycobiome' (i.e., the full set of fungi present) are associated with delayed healing, indicating that fungal profiling could become an important aspect of chronic wound care as medicine moves forward. Have a look at the link at the bottom of this post!

Pathogens are associated with poor outcomes. Mean proportion of pathogens (y axis) by end of study reason (x axis). Error bars indicate standard errors of the means.


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Reference:

Kalan, L., M. A. Loesche, B. P. Hodkinson, K. P. Heilmann, G. Ruthel, S. E. Gardner, and E. A. Grice. 2016. Redefining the chronic wound microbiome: fungal communities are prevalent, dynamic, and associated with delayed healing. mBio 7(5): e01058-16.
Download publication (PDF file)