Publications by authors named "J R Erb-Downward"

Chronic lung allograft dysfunction (CLAD) is the leading cause of death after lung transplant, and azithromycin has variable efficacy in CLAD. The lung microbiome is a risk factor for developing CLAD, but the relationship between lung dysbiosis, pulmonary inflammation, and allograft dysfunction remains poorly understood. Whether lung microbiota predict outcomes or modify treatment response CLAD is unknown.

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Article Synopsis
  • The airway microbiome may influence the development and progression of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), but its impact on milder cases remains unclear.
  • The study analyzed sputum DNA from 877 participants, mostly with milder COPD (stages 0-2), to examine the relationship between microbiome characteristics and various health markers.
  • It found that greater diversity in the airway microbiome correlated with better lung function and fewer symptoms, while lower diversity was linked to worse outcomes, suggesting that microbiome features could help predict lung health over time.
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Background: Asthma and obesity are both complex conditions characterized by chronic inflammation, and obesity-related severe asthma has been associated with differences in the microbiome. However, whether the airway microbiome and microbiota-immune response relationships differ between obese persons with or without nonsevere asthma is unestablished.

Objective: We compared the airway microbiome and microbiota-immune mediator relationships between obese and nonobese subjects, with and without mild-moderate asthma.

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Summary: Here, we introduce SNIKT, a command-line tool for sequence-independent visual confirmation and input-assisted removal of adapter contamination in whole-genome shotgun or metagenomic shotgun long-read sequencing DNA or RNA data.

Availability And Implementation: SNIKT is implemented in R and is compatible with Unix-like platforms. The source code, along with documentation, is freely available under an MIT license at https://github.

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Metagenomics holds potential to improve clinical diagnostics of infectious diseases, but DNA from clinical specimens is often dominated by host-derived sequences. To address this, researchers employ host-depletion methods. Laboratory-based host-depletion methods, however, are costly in terms of time and effort, while computational host-depletion methods rely on memory-intensive reference index databases and struggle to accurately classify noisy sequence data.

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