Gut microbiota signatures in inflammatory bowel disease.

Background: Inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD), including Crohn's disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC), affect millions of people worldwide with increasing incidence.

Objectives: Several studies have shown a link between gut microbiota composition and IBD, but results are often limited by small sample sizes. We aimed to re-analyze publicly available fecal microbiota data from IBD patients.

Characterizing the pre-clinical phase of inflammatory bowel disease.

Understanding the biological changes that precede a diagnosis of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) could facilitate pre-emptive interventions, including risk factor modification, but this pre-clinical phase of disease remains poorly characterized. Using measurements from 17 hematological and biochemical parameters taken up to 10 years before diagnosis in over 20,000 IBD patients and population controls, we address this at massive scale. We observe widespread significant changes in multiple biochemical and hematological parameters that occur up to 8 years before diagnosis of Crohn's disease (CD) and up to 3 years before diagnosis of ulcerative colitis.

Polo-like kinase 2 inhibition reduces serine-129 phosphorylation of physiological nuclear alpha-synuclein but not of the aggregated alpha-synuclein.

Accumulation of aggregated alpha-synuclein (α-syn) is believed to play a pivotal role in the pathophysiology of Parkinson's disease (PD) and other synucleinopathies. As a key constituent of Lewy pathology, more than 90% of α-syn in Lewy bodies is phosphorylated at serine-129 (pS129) and hence, it is used extensively as a marker for α-syn pathology. However, the exact role of pS129 remains controversial and the kinase(s) responsible for the phosphorylation have yet to be determined.