Publications by authors named "Brittany Hewitson"

Inborn errors of metabolism (IEMs) are rare genetic conditions with significant morbidity and mortality. Technological advances have increased therapeutic options, making it challenging to remain up to date. A centralized therapy knowledgebase is needed for early diagnosis and targeted treatment.

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Summary: To address the difficulty in assessing the implication of regulatory variants in diseases, a scoring scheme previously published allows the calculation of the Regulatory Variant Evidence score (RVE-score). The score represents the accumulated evidence for a causative role of a regulatory variant in a disease. Regulatory Evidence for Variants Underlying Phenotypes was built to calculate the RVE-score of regulatory variants, based on the 24 criteria, with a hybrid approach combining information retrieved from public databases and user input.

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Background: Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) is a powerful tool for studying complex biological systems, such as tumor heterogeneity and tissue microenvironments. However, the sources of technical and biological variation in primary solid tumor tissues and patient-derived mouse xenografts for scRNA-seq are not well understood.

Results: We use low temperature (6 °C) protease and collagenase (37 °C) to identify the transcriptional signatures associated with tissue dissociation across a diverse scRNA-seq dataset comprising 155,165 cells from patient cancer tissues, patient-derived breast cancer xenografts, and cancer cell lines.

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Single-cell RNA sequencing has enabled the decomposition of complex tissues into functionally distinct cell types. Often, investigators wish to assign cells to cell types through unsupervised clustering followed by manual annotation or via 'mapping' to existing data. However, manual interpretation scales poorly to large datasets, mapping approaches require purified or pre-annotated data and both are prone to batch effects.

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