Publications by authors named "Julia Gauglitz"

Article Synopsis
  • There is growing evidence linking onchocerciasis (a parasitic disease) to seizures, leading to the recognition of onchocerciasis-associated epilepsy (OAE) as a significant public health issue, especially in sub-Saharan Africa.
  • A recent workshop highlighted the need for a clear case definition of OAE and emphasized the importance of integrating epilepsy care into ongoing onchocerciasis elimination efforts to reduce the incidence of seizures.
  • Recommendations include enhancing collaboration between health programs, ensuring uninterrupted access to free anti-seizure medications in affected areas, and incorporating OAE into assessments of the overall onchocerciasis disease burden.
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Despite the increasing availability of tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) community spectral libraries for untargeted metabolomics over the past decade, the majority of acquired MS/MS spectra remain uninterpreted. To further aid in interpreting unannotated spectra, we created a nearest neighbor suspect spectral library, consisting of 87,916 annotated MS/MS spectra derived from hundreds of millions of MS/MS spectra originating from published untargeted metabolomics experiments. Entries in this library, or "suspects," were derived from unannotated spectra that could be linked in a molecular network to an annotated spectrum.

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Malaria is caused by parasites of the genus , and reached a global disease burden of 247 million cases in 2021. To study drug resistance mutations and parasite population dynamics, whole-genome sequencing of patient blood samples is commonly performed. However, the predominance of human DNA in these samples imposes the need for time-consuming laboratory procedures to enrich DNA.

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Human milk (HM) contains macronutrients, micronutrients, and a multitude of other bioactive factors, which can have a long-term impact on infant growth and development. We systematically searched MEDLINE, EMBASE, Cochrane Library, Scopus, and Web of Science to synthesize evidence published between 1980 and 2022 on HM components and anthropometry through 2 y of age among term-born infants. From 9992 abstracts screened, 141 articles were included and categorized based on their reporting of HM micronutrients, macronutrients, or bioactive components.

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Article Synopsis
  • Elective TIPS placement can worsen cognitive issues in patients with hepatic encephalopathy (HE) by allowing toxins to enter the bloodstream.
  • A study of 22 cirrhosis patients showed that existing intrahepatic shunts may predict the severity of HE after TIPS.
  • Post-TIPS changes in bile acid levels and certain chemicals in the blood are linked to HE severity, suggesting that these metabolomic changes could affect HE development.
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Hepatic encephalopathy (HE) is a common complication of advanced liver disease causing brain dysfunction. This is likely due to the accumulation of unfiltered toxins within the bloodstream. A known risk factor for developing or worsening HE is the placement of a transjugular intrahepatic portosystemic shunt (TIPS), which connects the pre-hepatic and post-hepatic circulation allowing some blood to bypass the dysfunctional liver and decreases portal hypertension.

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Human milk is the optimal infant nutrition. However, although human-derived metabolites (such as lipids and oligosaccharides) in human milk are regularly reported, the presence of exogenous chemicals (such as drugs, food, and synthetic compounds) are often not addressed. To understand the types of exogenous compounds that might be present, human milk (n = 996) was analyzed by untargeted metabolomics.

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Background: Obesity predominantly affects populations in high-income countries and those countries facing epidemiological transition. The risk of childhood obesity is increased among infants who had overweight or obesity at birth, but in low-resource settings one in five infants are born small for gestational age. We aimed to study the relationships between: (1) maternal metabolite signatures; (2) fetal abdominal growth; and (3) postnatal growth, adiposity, and neurodevelopment.

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Article Synopsis
  • Human metabolomics studies typically identify only about 10% of the molecular features present in samples.
  • The authors propose a new method that uses reference data to match metabolomics tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) data against annotated source data, effectively creating a pseudo-MS/MS library.
  • This new approach significantly improves the usage of MS/MS spectra by 5.1 times compared to traditional methods, enabling better analysis of dietary patterns from untargeted metabolomic data.
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The chemistry of indoor surfaces and the role of microbes in shaping and responding to that chemistry are largely unexplored. We found that, over 1 month, people's presence and activities profoundly reshaped the chemistry of a house. Molecules associated with eating/cooking, bathroom use, and personal care were found throughout the entire house, while molecules associated with medications, outdoor biocides, and microbially derived compounds were distributed in a location-dependent manner.

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The first week after birth is a critical time for the establishment of microbial communities for infants. Preterm infants face unique environmental impacts on their newly acquired microbiomes, including increased incidence of cesarean section delivery and exposure to antibiotics as well as delayed enteral feeding and reduced human interaction during their intensive care unit stay. Using contextualized paired metabolomics and 16S sequencing data, the development of the gut, skin, and oral microbiomes of infants is profiled daily for the first week after birth, and it is found that the skin microbiome appears robust to early life perturbation, while direct exposure of infants to antibiotics, rather than presumed maternal transmission, delays microbiome development and prevents the early differentiation based on body site regardless of delivery mode.

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There is a growing interest in unraveling the chemical complexity of our diets. To help the scientific community gain insight into the molecules present in foods and beverages that we ingest, we created foodMASST, a search tool for MS/MS spectra (of both known and unknown molecules) against a growing metabolomics food and beverage reference database. We envision foodMASST will become valuable for nutrition research and to assess the potential uniqueness of dietary biomarkers to represent specific foods or food classes.

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Background & Aims: Hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) is a promising treatment for moderate-to-severe ulcerative colitis. However, our current understanding of the host and microbial response to HBOT remains unclear. This study examined the molecular mechanisms underpinning HBOT using a multi-omic strategy.

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The study of food consumption, diet, and related concepts is motivated by diverse goals, including understanding why food consumption impacts our health, and why we eat the foods we do. These varied motivations can make it challenging to define and measure consumption, as it can be specified across nearly infinite dimensions-from micronutrients to carbon footprint to food preparation. This challenge is amplified by the dynamic nature of food consumption processes, with the underlying phenomena of interest often based on the nature of repeated interactions with food occurring over time.

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Although metals are essential for the molecular machineries of life, systematic methods for discovering metal-small molecule complexes from biological samples are limited. Here, we describe a two-step native electrospray ionization-mass spectrometry method, in which post-column pH adjustment and metal infusion are combined with ion identity molecular networking, a rule-based data analysis workflow. This method enabled the identification of metal-binding compounds in complex samples based on defined mass (m/z) offsets of ion species with the same chromatographic profiles.

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Molecular networking of non-targeted tandem mass spectrometry data connects structurally related molecules based on similar fragmentation spectra. Here, we report the ical portionality (ChemProp) contextualization of molecular networks. ChemProp scores the changes of abundance between two connected nodes over sequential data series (e.

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Article Synopsis
  • Molecular networking helps connect mass spectra based on fragmentation similarities, but different ion species from the same molecule often remain unconnected, causing redundancies.
  • The Ion Identity Molecular Networking (IIMN) method was developed to improve connectivity by correlating chromatographic peak shapes, linking different ion species of the same molecule.
  • This enhancement allows for better identification of related molecules, discovery of unknown ion-ligand complexes, and broader access to public spectral libraries.
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Standard workflows for analyzing microbiomes often include the creation and curation of phylogenetic trees. Here we present EMPress, an interactive web tool for visualizing trees in the context of microbiome, metabolome, and other community data scalable to trees with well over 500,000 nodes. EMPress provides novel functionality-including ordination integration and animations-alongside many standard tree visualization features and thus simplifies exploratory analyses of many forms of 'omic data.

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Genomics and metabolomics are widely used to explore specialized metabolite diversity. The Paired Omics Data Platform is a community initiative to systematically document links between metabolome and (meta)genome data, aiding identification of natural product biosynthetic origins and metabolite structures.

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Untargeted mass spectrometry is employed to detect small molecules in complex biospecimens, generating data that are difficult to interpret. We developed Qemistree, a data exploration strategy based on the hierarchical organization of molecular fingerprints predicted from fragmentation spectra. Qemistree allows mass spectrometry data to be represented in the context of sample metadata and chemical ontologies.

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Article Synopsis
  • Molecular networking is a technique used to analyze and visualize chemical compounds in non-targeted mass spectrometry data.
  • Feature-based molecular networking (FBMN) is a new analysis method within the GNPS framework that improves the detection and organization of chemical features.
  • FBMN allows for better quantitative analysis and differentiation of isomers, including those examined through ion mobility spectrometry.
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We present ReDU ( https://redu.ucsd.edu/ ), a system for metadata capture of public mass spectrometry-based metabolomics data, with validated controlled vocabularies.

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Global Natural Product Social Molecular Networking (GNPS) is an interactive online small molecule-focused tandem mass spectrometry (MS) data curation and analysis infrastructure. It is intended to provide as much chemical insight as possible into an untargeted MS dataset and to connect this chemical insight to the user's underlying biological questions. This can be performed within one liquid chromatography (LC)-MS experiment or at the repository scale.

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