Publications by authors named "Stacy Williams"

Valley Fever (VF), caused by fungi in the genus , is a prevalent disease in southwestern and western parts of the United States that affects both humans and animals, such as dogs. Although the immune responses to infection with spp. are not fully characterized, antibody-detection assays are used in conjunction with clinical presentation and radiologic findings to aid in the diagnosis of VF.

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spp. are dimorphic fungi that are capable of infecting human and non-human mammals and can cause diverse manifestations of coccidioidomycosis or Valley fever (VF). In combination with clinical symptoms and radiographic findings, antibody-based diagnostic tests are often used to diagnose and monitor patients with VF.

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Objective: This study investigated the seroprevalence of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies among adults over 18 years.

Design: Prospective cohort study.

Settings: A large public university.

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Patients with 2019 coronavirus disease (COVID-19) exhibit a broad spectrum of clinical presentations. A person's antimicrobial antibody profile, as partially shaped by past infection or vaccination, can reflect the immune system health that is critical to control and resolve the infection. We performed an explorative immunoproteomics study using microbial protein arrays displaying 318 full-length antigens from 77 viruses and 3 bacteria.

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Introduction: Oxidized LDL (oxLDL) is formed by the spontaneous reaction between aldehyde byproducts of lipid peroxidation and lysine residues of apolipoprotein B within LDL. Clinically, oxLDL is used as a marker of coronary artery disease and predictor of metabolic syndrome risk. Despite its popularity as a clinical marker, no systematic studies of oxLDL stability, in which serum or plasma has been pre-analytically exposed to an array of different time and temperature conditions, have been carried out.

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Article Synopsis
  • Chronic rhinosinusitis (CRS) involves complex microbial interactions, and this study tests the idea that analyzing specific antibodies to microbial proteins can help understand its causes.
  • The research used a new technology called NAPPA to analyze serum samples from 118 individuals (39 with CRS and 79 controls), focusing on antibodies against a wide range of bacterial and viral proteins.
  • Results showed CRS patients had higher levels of antibodies to certain bacteria (like Staphylococcus aureus) and viruses (including human metapneumovirus and herpesviruses), indicating possible recent infections or ongoing microbial colonization in these patients.
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Background: Chronic Helicobacter pylori infection may induce gastric intestinal metaplasia (IM). We compared anti-H. pylori antibody profiles between IM cases and non-atrophic gastritis (NAG) controls.

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Biomolecular integrity can be compromised when blood plasma/serum (P/S) specimens are improperly handled. Compromised analytes can subsequently produce erroneous results-without any indication of having done so. We recently introduced an LC/MS-based marker of P/S exposure to thawed conditions called ΔS-Cys-Albumin which, aided by an established rate law, quantitatively tracks exposure of P/S to temperatures greater than their freezing point of -30 °C.

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Background: The healthcare burden of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is rising globally and there are limited non-invasive biomarkers for accurate and early diagnosis.

Aim: To understand the important role that intestinal microbiota play in IBD pathogenesis and identify anti-microbial antibody signatures that benefit clinical management of IBD patients.

Methods: We performed serological profiling of 100 Crohn's disease (CD) patients, 100 ulcerative colitis (UC) patients and 100 healthy controls against 1173 bacterial and 397 viral proteins from 50 bacteria and 33 viruses on protein microarrays.

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Background: CT screening can detect lung cancer early but suffers a high false-positive rate. There is a need for molecular biomarkers that can distinguish malignant and benign indeterminate pulmonary nodules (IPN) detected by CT scan.

Methods: We profiled antibodies against 901 individual microbial antigens from 27 bacteria and 29 viruses in sera from 127 lung adenocarcinoma (ADC), 123 smoker controls (SMC), 170 benign nodule controls (BNC) individuals using protein microarrays to identify ADC and BNC specific antimicrobial antibodies.

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Canine diabetes has been considered a potential model of human type 1 diabetes (T1D), however the detection of autoantibodies common in humans with T1D in affected dogs is inconsistent. The aim of this study was to compare autoantibody responses in diabetic and healthy control dogs using a novel nucleic acid programmable protein array (NAPPA) platform. We performed a cross-sectional study of autoantibody profiles of 30 diabetic and 30 healthy control dogs of various breeds.

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Background: Around 10% of gastric carcinomas (GC) contain Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) DNA. We characterized the GC-specific antibody response to this common infection, which may provide a noninvasive method to detect EBV-positive GC and elucidate its contribution to carcinogenesis.

Methods: Plasma samples from EBV-positive (n = 28) and EBV-negative (n = 34) Latvian GC patients were immune-profiled against 85 EBV proteins on a multi-microbial Nucleic Acid Programmable Protein Array (EBV-NAPPA).

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Chronic infection is the major risk factor for gastric cancer (GC). However, only some infected individuals develop this neoplasia. Previous serology studies have been limited by investigating small numbers of candidate antigens.

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Fanconi anemia is a genetic disease resulting in bone marrow failure, birth defects, and cancer that is thought to encompass a defect in maintenance of genomic stability. Mutations in 16 genes (FANCA, B, C, D1, D2, E, F, G, I, J, L, M, N, O, P, and Q) have been identified in patients, with the Fanconi anemia subtype J (FA-J) resulting from homozygous mutations in the FANCJ gene. Here, we describe the direct interaction of FANCD2 with FANCJ.

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Staff burnout is widely believed to be problematic in mental healthcare, but few studies have linked burnout directly with quality of care. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between burnout and a newly developed scale for quality of care in a sample of community mental health workers (N=113). The Self-Reported Quality of Care scale had three distinct factors (Client-Centered Care, General Work Conscientiousness, and Low Errors), with good internal consistency.

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We investigate financial market correlations using random matrix theory and principal component analysis. We use random matrix theory to demonstrate that correlation matrices of asset price changes contain structure that is incompatible with uncorrelated random price changes. We then identify the principal components of these correlation matrices and demonstrate that a small number of components accounts for a large proportion of the variability of the markets that we consider.

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Fanconi anemia (FA) is a rare genetic disorder characterized by bone marrow failure and an increased risk for leukemia and cancer. Fifteen proteins thought to function in the repair of DNA interstrand crosslinks (ICLs) comprise what is known as the FA-BRCA pathway. Activation of this pathway leads to the monoubiquitylation and chromatin localization of FANCD2 and FANCI.

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Fanconi anemia (FA) is a rare genetic disorder characterized by bone marrow failure, congenital abnormalities, and an increased risk for cancer and leukemia. Components of the FA-BRCA pathway are thought to function in the repair of DNA interstrand cross-links. Central to this pathway is the monoubiquitylation and chromatin localization of 2 FA proteins, FA complementation group D2 (FANCD2) and FANCI.

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We study the cluster dynamics of multichannel (multivariate) time series by representing their correlations as time-dependent networks and investigating the evolution of network communities. We employ a node-centric approach that allows us to track the effects of the community evolution on the functional roles of individual nodes without having to track entire communities. As an example, we consider a foreign exchange market network in which each node represents an exchange rate and each edge represents a time-dependent correlation between the rates.

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The dynamical response of a population of interconnected objects, when exposed to external perturbations, is of great interest to physicists working on complex systems. Here we focus on human systems, by analyzing the dynamical response of the world's financial community to various types of unexpected events-including the 9/11 terrorist attacks as they unfolded on a minute-by-minute basis. For the unfolding events of 9/11, our results show that there was a gradual collective understanding of what was happening, rather than an immediate realization.

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In a system containing a large number of interacting stochastic processes, there will typically be many nonzero correlation coefficients. This makes it difficult to either visualize the system's interdependencies, or identify its dominant elements. Such a situation arises in foreign exchange (FX), which is the world's biggest market.

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