Publications by authors named "L Bruggeman"

The disproportionate risk for idiopathic proteinuric podocytopathies in Black people is explained, in part, by the presence of two risk alleles (G1 or G2) in the gene. The pathogenic mechanisms responsible for this genetic association remain incompletely understood. We analyzed glomerular RNASeq transcriptomes from patients with idiopathic nephrotic syndrome of which 72 had inferred African ancestry (AA) and 152 did not (noAA).

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Clinical studies of the urinary tract microbiome, termed urobiome, suggest a direct, antibiotic-dependent, impact of the urobiome on kidney physiology. However, evidence for kidney bacteria comes from indirect sources or infected tissue. Further, it is unclear how antibiotics impact kidney bacteria.

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Objectives: To understand the early stages if Alport nephropathy, we characterize the structural, functional, and biophysical properties of glomerular capillaries and podocytes in mice, analyze kidney cortex transcriptional profiles at three time points, and investigate the effects of the ER stress mitigation by TUDCA on these parameters. We use human FSGS associated genes to identify molecular pathways rescued by TUDCA.

Findings: We define a disease progression timeline in mice.

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In coronavirus disease-19 biopsies, detection of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 was rare with no evidence of viral replication, whereas autopsy tissue failed quality control. In patients with FSGS, apolipoprotein L1 expression differed by degree of immune cell infiltrates, with some podocytes exhibiting up to 18-fold higher expression. In COVAN, the predicted high induction of apolipoprotein L1 expression occurs in a pattern consistent with the stochastic nature of FSGS pathology.

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Since 2022, European countries have been facing an outbreak of mainly cutaneous diphtheria caused by toxigenic among asylum seekers. In Belgium, between 1 March and 31 December 2022, 25 cases of toxigenic infection were confirmed among asylum seekers, mostly among young males from Afghanistan. Multi-locus sequence typing showed that most isolates belonged to sequence types 574 or 377, similar to the majority of cases in other European countries.

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