Publications by authors named "Kate Alexander-Hardiman"
The pregnancy vaginal microbiome contributes to risk of preterm birth, the primary cause of death in children under 5 years of age. Here we describe direct on-swab metabolic profiling by Desorption Electrospray Ionization Mass Spectrometry (DESI-MS) for sample preparation-free characterisation of the cervicovaginal metabolome in two independent pregnancy cohorts (VMET, n = 160; 455 swabs; VMET II, n = 205; 573 swabs). By integrating metataxonomics and immune profiling data from matched samples, we show that specific metabolome signatures can be used to robustly predict simultaneously both the composition of the vaginal microbiome and host inflammatory status.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMass spectrometry has established itself as a powerful tool in the chemical, biological, medical, environmental, and agricultural fields. However, experimental approaches and potential application areas have been limited by a traditional reliance on sample preparation, extraction, and chromatographic separation. Ambient ionization mass spectrometry methods have addressed this challenge but are still somewhat restricted in requirements for sample manipulation to make it suitable for analysis.
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- Sparse data on maternal milk composition typically only covers the early postnatal period, but this study expands that to participants aged 3-48 months and finds minimal changes beyond 24 months of lactation.
- Researchers used advanced techniques like REIMS and 16S rRNA gene metataxonomics to analyze the milk, revealing that while the volume of expressed milk decreased after 24 months, its bacterial and metabolite composition remained largely stable.
- Individual metabolites showed some changes in abundance in older nurslings, but overall, lifestyle factors and nursling sex had little effect, indicating that human milk composition is remarkably consistent throughout prolonged lactation.
The accurate and timely identification of the causative organism of infection is important in ensuring the optimum treatment regimen is prescribed for a patient. Rapid evaporative ionisation mass spectrometry (REIMS), using electrical diathermy for the thermal disruption of a sample, has been shown to provide fast and accurate identification of microorganisms directly from culture. However, this method requires contact to be made between the REIMS probe and microbial biomass; resulting in the necessity to clean or replace the probes between analyses.
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