Publications by authors named "J Purkerson"

The lung is a vital organ that undergoes extensive morphological and functional changes during postnatal development. To disambiguate how different cell populations contribute to organ development, we performed proteomic and transcriptomic analyses of four sorted cell populations from the lung of human subjects aged 0 to 8 years-old with a focus on early life. The cell populations analyzed included epithelial, endothelial, mesenchymal, and immune cells.

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Article Synopsis
  • - Linked glycosylation is a key modification of proteins that impacts lung function by helping proteins fold and facilitating communication between cells, making it crucial for understanding respiratory health.
  • - The study utilized advanced techniques like MALDI mass spectrometry imaging and co-detection by indexing to identify specific glycan structures in various lung regions, showing their unique locations around different cell types.
  • - Results indicated that certain glycan types are concentrated around specific cells and areas in the lungs, hinting that these glycan structures may have distinct roles in cellular function and responses, which could inform future lung research.
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The human kidney is a vital organ with a remarkable ability to coordinate the activity of up to a million nephrons, its main functional tissue unit (FTU), and maintain homeostasis. We developed tissue processing and analytical methods to construct a 3D map of neurovascular nephron connectivity of the human kidney and glean insights into how this structural organization enables coordination of various functions of the nephron, such as glomerular filtration, solute and water absorption, secretion by the tubules, and regulation of blood flow and pressure by the juxtaglomerular apparatus, in addition to how these functions change across disease and lifespans. Using light sheet fluorescence microscopy (LSFM) and morphometric analysis we discovered changes in anatomical orientation of the vascular pole, glomerular density, volume, and innervation through postnatal development and ageing.

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The Human BioMolecular Atlas Program (HuBMAP) aims to construct a reference 3D structural, cellular, and molecular atlas of the healthy adult human body. The HuBMAP Data Portal (https://portal.hubmapconsortium.

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Bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD) is a disease of prematurity related to the arrest of normal lung development. The objective of this study was to better understand how proteome modulation and cell-type shifts are noted in BPD pathology. Pediatric human donors aged 1-3 yr were classified based on history of prematurity and histopathology consistent with "healed" BPD (hBPD, = 3) and "established" BPD (eBPD, = 3) compared with respective full-term born ( = 6) age-matched term controls.

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