Publications by authors named "Junmei Samantha Kwah"
Article Synopsis
- The study examines the relationship between skin oxylipins, which are bioactive lipids produced from fatty acids by skin microbes, and different microbial communities on the skin of children and adults.
- Findings highlighted that Malassezia restricta, a type of skin fungus, has a positive impact on the production of a specific oxylipin (9,10-DiHOME) in adults, while showing a negative correlation with its precursor in children, indicating differences in skin chemistry across age groups.
- The research suggests a complex communication system between skin microbes and host lipid metabolism that could have implications for skin health, emphasizing the need for further exploration of these interactions for potential therapeutic applications.
BEEM-Static provides new opportunities for mining ecologically interpretable interactions and systems insights from the growing corpus of microbiome data.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFArticle Synopsis
- Disinfection is critical for infection control, but the patterns of microbial colonization and antibiotic resistance in hospital environments are still not fully understood.
- Researchers conducted extensive genomic studies of microbiomes and antibiotic resistance in a tertiary-care hospital, revealing distinct microbial niches and resistance gene patterns influenced by biofilms and human microbiomes.
- The study found that multidrug-resistant strains can persist in hospitals for over 8 years, posing a risk for opportunistic infections, underscoring the need for systematic monitoring of antibiotic resistance to improve infection prevention strategies.
Background: The dynamics of microbial communities is driven by a range of interactions from symbiosis to predator-prey relationships, the majority of which are poorly understood. With the increasing availability of high-throughput microbiome taxonomic profiling data, it is now conceivable to directly learn the ecological models that explicitly define microbial interactions and explain community dynamics. The applicability of these approaches is severely limited by the lack of accurate absolute cell density measurements (biomass).
View Article and Find Full Text PDF