Publications by authors named "Anna Stittrich"

Background: Agammaglobulinemia due to variants in IGLL1 has traditionally been considered an exceedingly rare form of severe B-cell deficiency, with only 8 documented cases in the literature. Surprisingly, the first agammaglobulinemic patient identified by newborn screening (NBS) through quantification of kappa-deleting recombination excision circles harbored variants in IGLL1.

Objective: We comprehensively reviewed clinical and immunologic findings of patients with B-cell deficiency attributed to variants in IGLL1.

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In patients with severe and recurrent infections, minimal diagnostic workup to test for Inborn Errors of Immunity (IEI) includes a full blood count, IgG, IgA and IgM. Vaccine antibodies against tetanus toxoid are also frequently measured, whereas testing for anti-polysaccharide IgG antibodies and IgG subclasses is not routinely performed by primary care physicians. This basic approach may cause a significant delay in diagnosing monogenic IEI that can present with an impaired IgG response to polysaccharide antigens with or without IgG subclass deficiency at an early stage.

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Heterozygous germline variants in human encoding for IKAROS define an inborn error of immunity with immunodeficiency, immune dysregulation and risk of malignancy with a broad phenotypic spectrum. Growing evidence of underlying pathophysiological genotype-phenotype correlations helps to improve our understanding of IKAROS-associated diseases. We describe 6 patients from 4 kindreds with two novel variants leading to haploinsufficiency from 3 centers in Germany.

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We describe humans with rare biallelic loss-of-function variants impairing pre-α T cell receptor (pre-TCRα) expression. Low circulating naive αβ T cell counts at birth persisted over time, with normal memory αβ and high γδ T cell counts. Their TCRα repertoire was biased, which suggests that noncanonical thymic differentiation pathways can rescue αβ T cell development.

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Article Synopsis
  • * Variants of UNC93B1 (E92G and R336L) were found in patients with early-onset systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), correlating with heightened inflammatory responses when stimulated by TLR7/TLR8 agonists.
  • * The E92G variant destabilizes the UNC93B1 protein, leading to increased TLR7 activity and type I interferon signaling, pointing to a potential therapeutic target for managing SLE by focusing on TLR7.
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Primary Immune thrombocytopenia (ITP) is an autoimmune disease. Secondary ITP occurs in patients with underlying diseases such as common variable immunodeficiency (CVID). CVID is one of the most common symptomatic primary immunodeficiencies in adults, characterised by infectious and non-infectious symptoms.

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Background: Assessment of T-cell receptor excision circles (TRECs) in dried blood spots of newborns allows the detection of severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID) (T cells <300/μL at birth) with a presumed sensitivity of 100%. TREC screening also identifies patients with selected combined immunodeficiency (CID) (T cells >300/μL, yet <1500/μL at birth). Nevertheless, relevant CIDs that would benefit from early recognition and curative treatment pass undetected.

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  • Immune responses to seasonal coronaviruses may help protect against SARS-CoV-2, but there's limited research on kidney transplant recipients' immunity.
  • A study compared immune responses against SARS-CoV-2 in kidney transplant recipients and non-transplanted individuals, revealing detectable MBCs but no SARS-CoV-2 IgG antibodies pre-pandemic.
  • The findings suggest kidney transplant recipients retain some cross-reactive B and T cell memory, indicating primed adaptive immunity, though outcomes may vary based on immunosuppressive medications they take.
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While virus-specific antibodies are broadly recognized as correlates of protection, virus-specific T cells are important for direct clearance of infected cells. Failure to generate hepatitis B virus (HBV)-specific antibodies is well-known in patients with end-stage renal disease. However, whether and to what extent HBV-specific cellular immunity is altered in this population and how it influences humoral immunity is not clear.

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Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) in various genes have been described to be associated with susceptibility to autoimmune disease. In this study, myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) patients and controls were genotyped for five immune gene SNPs in tyrosine phosphatase non-receptor type 22 (, rs2476601), cytotoxic T-lymphocyte-associated protein 4 (, rs3087243), tumor necrosis factor (, rs1800629 and rs1799724), and interferon regulatory factor 5 (, rs3807306), which are among the most important risk variants for autoimmune diseases. Analysis of 305 ME/CFS patients and 201 healthy controls showed significant associations of the rs2476601 and rs3087243 autoimmunity-risk alleles with ME/CFS.

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In the version of this article published, the P values for the enrichment of single mutation categories were inadvertently not corrected for multiple testing. After multiple-testing correction, only two of the six mutation categories mentioned are still statistically significant. To reflect this, the text "More specifically, paternally derived DNMs are enriched in transitions in A[.

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De novo mutations (DNMs) originating in gametogenesis are an important source of genetic variation. We use a data set of 7,216 autosomal DNMs with resolved parent of origin from whole-genome sequencing of 816 parent-offspring trios to investigate differences between maternally and paternally derived DNMs and study the underlying mutational mechanisms. Our results show that the number of DNMs in offspring increases not only with paternal age, but also with maternal age, and that some genome regions show enrichment for maternally derived DNMs.

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Currently, the best clinical predictor for inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is family history. Over 163 sequence variants have been associated with IBD in genome-wide association studies, but they have weak effects and explain only a fraction of the observed heritability. It is expected that additional variants contribute to the genomic architecture of IBD, possibly including rare variants with effect sizes larger than the identified common variants.

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The identification of DNA copy numbers from short-read sequencing data remains a challenge for both technical and algorithmic reasons. The raw data for these analyses are measured in tens to hundreds of gigabytes per genome; transmitting, storing, and analyzing such large files is cumbersome, particularly for methods that analyze several samples simultaneously. We developed a very efficient representation of depth of coverage (150-1000× compression) that enables such analyses.

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