Publications by authors named "Mohammad Mirhakkak"

Background: The pathogenesis of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) with a global prevalence of 30% is multifactorial and the involvement of gut bacteria has been recently proposed. However, finding robust bacterial signatures of NAFLD has been a great challenge, mainly due to its co-occurrence with other metabolic diseases.

Results: Here, we collected public metagenomic data and integrated the taxonomy profiles with in silico generated community metabolic outputs, and detailed clinical data, of 1206 Chinese subjects w/wo metabolic diseases, including NAFLD (obese and lean), obesity, T2D, hypertension, and atherosclerosis.

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Metabolic exchanges between strains in gut microbial communities shape their composition and interactions with the host. This study investigates the metabolic synergy between potential probiotic bacteria and Saccharomyces boulardii, aiming to enhance anti-inflammatory effects within a multi-species probiotic community. By screening a collection of 85 potential probiotic bacterial strains, we identified two strains that demonstrated a synergistic relationship with S.

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Article Synopsis
  • Aspergillus fumigatus is an opportunistic pathogen that often infects the lungs of cystic fibrosis patients and poses a significant risk to immunocompromised individuals, leading to high rates of infectious disease-related deaths.
  • Researchers developed 252 strain-specific, genome-scale metabolic models of A. fumigatus, revealing that over 23% of its metabolic reactions vary between strains, particularly in amino acid, nucleotide, and nitrogen metabolism.
  • Analysis of sputum from cystic fibrosis patients indicates that A. fumigatus influences the lung microbiome, promoting conditions favorable for its growth, which could guide future drug development or microbiome interventions targeting this fungus.
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Candida species overgrowth in the human gut is considered a prerequisite for invasive candidiasis, but our understanding of gut bacteria promoting or restricting this overgrowth is still limited. By integrating cross-sectional mycobiome and shotgun metagenomics data from the stool of 75 male and female cancer patients at risk but without systemic candidiasis, bacterial communities in high Candida samples display higher metabolic flexibility yet lower contributional diversity than those in low Candida samples. We develop machine learning models that use only bacterial taxa or functional relative abundances to predict the levels of Candida genus and species in an external validation cohort with an AUC of 78.

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Candida auris, a multidrug-resistant human fungal pathogen that causes outbreaks of invasive infections, emerged as four distinct geographical clades. Previous studies identified genomic and proteomic differences in nutrient utilization on comparison to Candida albicans, suggesting that certain metabolic features may contribute to C. auris emergence.

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Intestinal microbiota dysbiosis can initiate overgrowth of commensal Candida species - a major predisposing factor for disseminated candidiasis. Commensal bacteria such as Lactobacillus rhamnosus can antagonize Candida albicans pathogenicity. Here, we investigate the interplay between C.

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Protein kinases play a crucial role in regulating cellular processes such as growth, proliferation, environmental adaptation and stress responses. Serine-arginine (SR) protein kinases are highly conserved in eukaryotes and regulate fundamental processes such as constitutive and alternative splicing, mRNA processing and ion homeostasis. The genome encodes two (Sky1, Sky2) and the genome has one homolog (Sky1) of the human SR protein kinase 1, but their functions have not yet been investigated.

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Antibiotics are commonly used in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU); however, several studies showed that the impact of antibiotics to prevent infection, multi-organ failure, and death in the ICU is less clear than their benefit on course of infection in the absence of organ dysfunction. We characterized here the compositional and metabolic changes of the gut microbiome induced by critical illness and antibiotics in a cohort of 75 individuals in conjunction with 2,180 gut microbiome samples representing 16 different diseases. We revealed an "infection-vulnerable" gut microbiome environment present only in critically ill treated with antibiotics (ICU).

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Candida albicans is a leading cause of life-threatening hospital-acquired infections and can lead to Candidemia with sepsis-like symptoms and high mortality rates. We reconstructed a genome-scale C. albicans metabolic model to investigate bacterial-fungal metabolic interactions in the gut as determinants of fungal abundance.

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Article Synopsis
  • Rhinovirus (RV) and influenza viruses (IAV and IBV) are key respiratory viruses causing pneumonia, with distinct clinical and immune responses noted in previous studies.
  • A systematic study comparing the transcriptomic response of human airway cells infected with RV, IAV, and IBV revealed that RV triggers a less robust host response, showing fewer differentially expressed genes (DEGs) than the influenza viruses.
  • Key upregulated genes across all infections were linked to interferon and chemokine pathways, with ICAM5 being significantly expressed during RV infection, highlighting areas for further research.
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