Publications by authors named "Robert Egan"

The North Temperate Lakes Long-Term Ecological Research (NTL-LTER) program has been extensively used to improve understanding of how aquatic ecosystems respond to environmental stressors, climate fluctuations, and human activities. Here, we report on the metagenomes of samples collected between 2000 and 2019 from Lake Mendota, a freshwater eutrophic lake within the NTL-LTER site. We utilized the distributed metagenome assembler MetaHipMer to coassemble over 10 terabases (Tbp) of data from 471 individual Illumina-sequenced metagenomes.

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Purpose: To describe a patient with a unique retinal phenotype of probable Susac syndrome.

Observations: A 47-year-old female who presented with bilateral tinnitus and vision changes was found to have bilateral sensorineural hearing loss and many bilateral retinal arteriolar Gass plaques. She had bilateral scotomas corresponding with temporal thinning and atrophy of the inner nuclear layer (INL) on OCT.

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Background: Susac syndrome is a vasculopathy, resulting in the classic triad of branch retinal artery occlusion (BRAO), inner ear ischemia, and brain ischemia. In this retrospective chart review, we characterize fluorescein angiography (FA) findings and other ancillary studies in Susac syndrome, including the appearance of persistent disease activity and the occurrence of new subclinical disease on FA.

Methods: This multicenter, retrospective case series was institutional review board-approved and included patients with the complete triad of Susac syndrome evaluated with FA, contrasted MRI of the brain, and audiometry from 2010 to 2020.

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Introduction: Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has been recently associated with infarction of the central splenium of the corpus callosum. These are described as cytotoxic lesions, and imaging rarely reveals enhancement. They have not been described in the body or head of the corpus callosum.

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Article Synopsis
  • Hydroxyl radical protein footprinting (HRPF) is an advanced technique used to study protein structure changes, and its efficiency has improved with the fast photochemical oxidation of proteins (FPOP).
  • Despite its advantages, FPOP has limitations due to the risks associated with using hazardous lasers and issues with reproducibility.
  • The newly developed FOX Protein Footprinting System simplifies this process by using a high-pressure flash lamp for quick oxidation, includes a radical dosimeter for real-time measurement, and has shown its efficacy by successfully identifying the epitope of TNFα recognized by adalimumab.
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Posterior cortical atrophy (PCA) is a neurodegenerative syndrome that presents with higher-order visual dysfunction with relative sparing of memory and other cognitive domains, and it is most commonly associated with Alzheimer's disease pathology. There is a lack of data regarding the presentation of PCA to non-cognitive specialists. Therefore, we collected clinical data from neuro-ophthalmologists regarding the presentation of PCA to their practices and compared data to published cohorts and a published survey of cognitive specialists.

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Objective: In population-based studies asymptomatic retinal emboli occur in .32%-2.9% of people.

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Metagenomic sequence data from defined mock communities is crucial for the assessment of sequencing platform performance and downstream analyses, including assembly, binning and taxonomic assignment. We report a comparison of shotgun metagenome sequencing and assembly metrics of a defined microbial mock community using the Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT) MinION, PacBio and Illumina sequencing platforms. Our synthetic microbial community BMock12 consists of 12 bacterial strains with genome sizes spanning 3.

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Lisch nodules are melanocytic hamartomas that have been hypothesized to grow larger in the presence of sunlight. A 17-year-old boy with neurofibromatosis Type 1 and congenital ptosis in one eye presented and was found to have a distinct asymmetry of Lisch nodules between eyes with less under the ptotic lid. This case supports the theory that Lisch nodules form at least partially due to a direct trophic effect of sunlight.

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Hydroxyl radical protein footprinting (HRPF) is a powerful method for measuring protein topography, allowing researchers to monitor events that alter the solvent accessible surface of a protein (e.g., ligand binding, aggregation, conformational changes, etc.

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Background: Susac syndrome (SS) classically presents with the clinical triad of retinal artery occlusion, sensorineural hearing loss, and encephalopathy and the neuroimaging triad of white matter lesions, deep gray matter lesions, and leptomeningeal disease. However, patients can present with an incomplete clinical or neuroimaging triads making diagnosis difficult in certain situations. A standard treatment paradigm also is lacking in this illness.

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Background: The ophthalmic findings of Susac syndrome (SS) consist of visual field defects related to branch retinal artery occlusion (BRAO), and fluorescein angiography (FA) reveals a unique staining pattern. To date, retinal arterial collateral development has been described only in a single patient. Given that the immunopathological process in SS induces retinal ischemia, it is conceivable that abnormal blood vessel development may occur in affected individuals.

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Article Synopsis
  • Methods for assembling and analyzing metagenome data are crucial but face challenges due to varying benchmarks for performance evaluation.
  • The CAMI challenge brought together developers to test their programs on complex data sets from approximately 700 new microorganisms and 600 viruses, revealing strengths and weaknesses in different analysis methods.
  • Key findings include that assembly works well for unique species, but struggles with closely related strains, and that both taxonomic profiling and binning are effective at higher taxonomic levels but less so at lower levels; settings for parameters significantly influence results, guiding future software choices.
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Functional vision disorder (FVD) is a common problem seen in many neurologic and ophthalmologic practitioners' offices and may occur in isolation or in the presence of medical illness. This disorder presents with visual or oculomotor symptoms and manifests as vision loss in one or both eyes, visual field loss, double vision, oscillopsia, anisocoria, blepharospasm, or ptosis. Manual perimetry is the most effective method for determining functional visual loss, and the presence of a central scotoma in a functional visual field signifies that a neuropathophysiologic process is almost certainly present.

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Susac's syndrome is a rare autoimmune microangiopathy characterized by the clinical triad of encephalopathy, branch retinal artery occlusions, and sensorineural hearing loss. In many cases, the clinical triad is not fully present at the onset of symptoms. MRI studies often show characteristic punched out lesions of the central fibers of the corpus callosum, and leptomeningeal enhancement and deep gray matter lesions may also be seen.

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Editors' Note: Dr. Egan inquires about the possibility of Tournay phenomenon in Kawasaki and Mayer's "Tadpole pupil." Dr.

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