Faculty Bibliography

Since the latter part of 2020, SARS-CoV-2 evolution has been characterised by the emergence of viral variants associated with distinct biological characteristics. While the main research focus has centred on the ability of new variants to increase in frequency and impact the effective reproductive number of the virus, less attention has been placed on their relative ability to establish transmission chains and to spread through a geographic area. Here, we describe a phylogeographic approach to estimate and compare the introduction and dispersal dynamics of the main SARS-CoV-2 variants-Alpha, Iota, Delta, and Omicron-that circulated in the New York City area between 2020 and 2022. Notably, our results indicate that Delta had a lower ability to establish sustained transmission chains in the NYC area and that Omicron (BA.1) was the variant fastest to disseminate across the study area. The analytical approach presented here complements non-spatially-explicit analytical approaches that seek a better understanding of the epidemiological differences that exist among successive SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern.

OBJECTIVES/OBJECTIVE:To investigate the cutaneous microbiome spanning the entire psoriatic disease spectrum, and to evaluate distinguishing features of psoriasis (PsO) and psoriatic arthritis (PsA). METHODS:Skin swabs were collected from upper and lower extremities of healthy individuals and patients with PsO and PsA. Psoriatic patients contributed both lesional (L) and contralateral non-lesional (NL) samples. Microbiota were analysed using 16S rRNA sequencing. RESULTS:was higher in NL PsA samples compared with NL PsO samples (p<0.05), potentially serving as a biomarker for disease progression. CONCLUSIONS:These findings show differences in diversity, bacterial composition and microbe-microbe interactions between healthy and psoriatic skin, both L and NL. We further identified bacterial biomarkers that differentiate disease phenotypes, which could potentially aid in predicting the transition from PsO to PsA.

The emergence of recombinant viruses is a threat to public health, as recombination may integrate variant-specific features that together result in escape from treatment or immunity. The selective advantages of recombinant SARS-CoV-2 isolates over their parental lineages remain unknown. We identified a Delta-Omicron (AY.45-BA.1) recombinant in an immunosuppressed transplant recipient treated with monoclonal antibody Sotrovimab. The single recombination breakpoint is located in the spike N-terminal domain adjacent to the Sotrovimab binding site. While Delta and BA.1 are sensitive to Sotrovimab neutralization, the Delta-Omicron recombinant is highly resistant. To our knowledge, this is the first described instance of recombination between circulating SARS-CoV-2 variants as a functional mechanism of resistance to treatment and immune escape.

The tumor microenvironment (TME) in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is a complex ecosystem that drives tumor progression; however, in-depth single cell characterization of the PDAC TME and its role in response to therapy is lacking. Here, we perform single-cell RNA sequencing on freshly collected human PDAC samples either before or after chemotherapy. Overall, we find a heterogeneous mixture of basal and classical cancer cell subtypes, along with distinct cancer-associated fibroblast and macrophage subpopulations. Strikingly, classical and basal-like cancer cells exhibit similar transcriptional responses to chemotherapy and do not demonstrate a shift towards a basal-like transcriptional program among treated samples. We observe decreased ligand-receptor interactions in treated samples, particularly between TIGIT on CD8 + T cells and its receptor on cancer cells, and identify TIGIT as the major inhibitory checkpoint molecule of CD8 + T cells. Our results suggest that chemotherapy profoundly impacts the PDAC TME and may promote resistance to immunotherapy.

New mutations conferring resistance to SARS-CoV-2 therapeutics have important clinical implications. We describe the first cases of an independently acquired V792I RNA-dependent RNA polymerase mutation developing in renal transplant recipients after remdesivir exposure. Our work underscores the need for augmented efforts to identify concerning mutations and address their clinical implications.

Soil-transmitted intestinal worms known as helminths colonize over 1.5 billion people worldwide. Although helminth colonization has been associated with altered composition of the gut microbiota, such as increases in Clostridia, individual species have not been isolated and characterized. Here, we isolate and sequence the genome of 13 Clostridia from the Orang Asli, an indigenous population in Malaysia with a high prevalence of helminth infections. Metagenomic analysis of 650 fecal samples from urban and rural Malaysians confirm the prevalence of species corresponding to these isolates and reveal a specific association between Peptostreptococcaceae family members and helminth colonization. Remarkably, Peptostreptococcaceae isolated from the Orang Asli display superior capacity to promote the life cycle of whipworm species, including hatching of eggs from Trichuris muris and Trichuris trichiura. These findings support a model in which helminths select for gut colonization of microbes that support their life cycle.

Patients with HIV exhibit platelet activation and increased risk of cardiovascular disease, the prevention of which is not fully known. Fifty-five HIV-positive patients were randomized to clopidogrel, aspirin, or no-treatment for 14 days, and the platelet phenotype and ability to induce endothelial inflammation assessed. Clopidogrel as opposed to aspirin and no-treatment reduced platelet activation (P-selectin and PAC-1 expression). Compared with baseline, platelet-induced proinflammatory transcript expression of cultured endothelial cells were reduced in those assigned to clopidogrel, with no change in the aspirin and no-treatment arms. In HIV, clinical trials of clopidogrel to prevent cardiovascular disease are warranted. (Antiplatelet Therapy in HIV; NCT02559414)

The little skate Leucoraja erinacea, a cartilaginous fish, displays pelvic fin driven walking-like behavior using genetic programs and neuronal subtypes similar to those of land vertebrates. However, mechanistic studies on little skate motor circuit development have been limited, due to a lack of high-quality reference genome. Here, we generated an assembly of the little skate genome, with precise gene annotation and structures, which allowed post-genome analysis of spinal motor neurons (MNs) essential for locomotion. Through interspecies comparison of mouse, skate and chicken MN transcriptomes, shared and divergent gene expression profiles were identified. Comparison of accessible chromatin regions between mouse and skate MNs predicted shared transcription factor (TF) motifs with divergent ones, which could be used for achieving differential regulation of MN-expressed genes. A greater number of TF motif predictions were observed in MN-expressed genes in mouse than in little skate. These findings suggest conserved and divergent molecular mechanisms controlling MN development of vertebrates during evolution, which might contribute to intricate gene regulatory networks in the emergence of a more sophisticated motor system in tetrapods.

Background/Purpose: The skin is recognized as a window into the immunopathogenic mechanisms driving the vast phenotypic spectrum of psoriatic disease.
Method(s): To better decipher the cellular landscape of both healthy and psoriatic skin, we employed spatial transcriptomics (ST), a ground-breaking technology that precisely maps gene expression from histologically-intact tissue sections (Fig. 1A).
Result(s): Findings gleaned from computationally integrating our 23 matched lesional and non-lesional psoriatic and 7 healthy control samples with publicly-available single-cell ribonucleic acid (RNA) sequencing datasets established the ability of ST to recapitulate the tissue architecture of both healthy and inflamed skin (Fig. 1B) and highlighted topographic shifts in the immune cell milieu, from a predominantly perifollicular distribution in steady-state skin to the papillary and upper reticular dermis in psoriatic lesional skin. We also incidentally discovered that ST's ability to ascertain gene expression patterns from intact tissue rendered it particularly conducive to studying the transcriptome of lipid-laden cells such as dermal adipose tissue and sebaceous glands (Fig. 1C), whose expression profiles are typically lost in the process of tissue handling and dissociation for bulk and single-cell RNA seq. Unbiased clustering of pooled healthy and psoriatic samples identified two epidermal clusters and one dermal cluster that were differentially expanded in psoriatic lesional skin (p values <=0.05) (Fig. 1D); pathway analysis of these clusters revealed enrichment of known psoriatic inflammatory pathways (Fig. 1E). Unsupervised classification of skin-limited psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis samples revealed stratification by cutaneous disease severity or Psoriasis Area and Severity Index (PASI) score and not by presence or absence of concomitant systemic/synovial disease (Fig. 1F). Remarkably, this PASI-dependent segregation was also evident in distal, non-lesional samples and was driven by the dermal macrophage and fibroblast cluster and the lymphatic endothelium (Fig. 2A). Inquiry into the mechanistic drivers of this observed stratification yielded enrichment of pathways associated with key T cell and innate immune cell activation, B cells, and metabolic dysfunction (Fig. 2B). Finally, tissue scale computational cartography of gene expression revealed differences in regional enrichment of specific cell types across phenotypic groups, most notably upward extension of fibroblasts to the upper dermis in both lesional and non-lesional samples from mild psoriasis and restriction to the lower dermis in the moderate-to-severe psoriasis samples (Fig. 2C), suggesting that disease severity stratification may be driven by emergent cellular ecosystems in the upper dermis. Fig. 1. (A) Schematic of spatial transcriptomics study workflow. Four mm skin punch biopsies were obtained from healthy volunteers (n=3) and lesional and non-lesional skin from patients with psoriatic disease (n=11). Ten micron-thick sections were then placed on capture areas on the ST microarray slide, each containing molecularly barcoded, spatially encoded spots with a diameter of 50 microns and a center-to-center distance of 100 microns. (B) Side-by-side comparison of a hematoxylin-eosin (H&E) stained section of representative healthy, lesional, and non-lesional skin samples and the corresponding ST plots showed concordance of unbiased gene expression-based clustering with histologic tissue architecture. (C) Pathway analysis of the adipose cluster in healthy skin (cluster 2) confirmed upregulation of lipid-associated processes. Inset: Spots corresponding to the adipose cluster highlighted in yellow. (D) Wilcoxon rank sum test (results displayed as box plots) yielded statistically significant expansion of three clusters in lesional skin compared to both non-lesional and healthy skin-inflamed suprabasal epidermis (cluster 4), epidermis 2 (cluster 7), and inflamed dermis (cluster 10). HC=healthy control, L=lesional psoriatic skin, NL=non-lesional psoriatic skin. (E) Pathways enriched in clusters 4, 7, and 10. (F) Principal component analysis (PCA) plots demonstrating segregation of samples by severity of cutaneous disease in both lesional and non-lesional samples along the first principal component (right) that was not seen in the samples categorized according to presence or absence of arthritis (left). PsA=psoriatic arthritis, PsO=skin-limited psoriasis. Fig. 2. (A) PCA of lesional and non-lesional samples colored by disease severity in spatial clusters 1 (left) and 12 (right) revealed more discrete clustering. (B) Pathways significantly enriched in clusters 1 (left) and 12 (right) showed enrichment of pathways associated with key T cell and innate immune cell activation, B cells, and metabolic dysfunction (highlighted in red). (C) SpaceFold one dimension projection of cell distribution from an independently-generated single-cell RNA seq data set on aggregated ST lesional and non-lesional samples from mild (PASI-low) and moderate-severe (PASI-high) samples. Y-axis represents tissue position, starting with the lower dermis marked as position 0 to suprabasal epidermis marked as position 1. Dashed line represents epidermal-dermal junction, discerned by cell types in the basal epidermal layer (melanocytes and Langerhans cells). Fibroblast signatures (red arrows) were largely relegated to the lower dermis in the PASI-high group, but extended to the upper dermis in the PASI-low group. This striking difference in fibroblast localization was also noted in non-lesional PASI-high vs. PASI-low groups. In addition to fibroblasts, lymphatic, endothelial, myeloid, and T cells signatures (black arrows) were also observed in the upper dermis of lesional PASI-low samples, but were much lower in the dermis of PASI-low non-lesional and all samples in the PASI-high group. Interfollicular epidermis (IFE), hair follicle and infundibulum (HF/IFN), n= number of individual biopsies.
Conclusion(s): Thus, we have been able to successfully leverage ST integrated with independently-generated single-cell RNA seq data to spatially define the emergent cellular ecosystems of healthy and matched psoriatic lesional and non-lesional skin and in so doing, demonstrated the value of ST in unearthing the genetic groundwork at both the site of inflammation and in distal, clinically-uninvolved skin