Novemer 12th is World Pneumonia Day – celebrate by getting vaccinated against influenza and pneumococcal pneumonia!

Novemer 12th is World Pneumonia Day – celebrate by getting vaccinated against influenza and pneumococcal pneumonia!


Hear the interview on Metro Morning with Matt Galloway here:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/programs/metromorning/researchers-find-getting-the-flu-can-lead-to-other-diseases-1.3315848

Read about why older adults should be vaccinated against pneumococcal pneumonia and influenza, as profiled by the CBC here:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/flu-vaccines-mcmaster-1.3315511?cmp=rss

and here

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/programs/metromorning/pathologist-deeply-saddened-vaccines-distrust-1.3315893

To hear Dawn discuss the benefits of vaccination for older adults on London AM 960 The Pulse with Devon Peacock (airdate: Nov 13, 2015) click here:
http://www.am980.ca/the-pulse/

To read about the link between dementia and pneumonia:
http://www.atsjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1164/rccm.201212-2154OC#.VkTWTHarRaR

To read about the link between cardiovascular disease and pneumonia
http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=2091304

Work in the Bowdish lab is funded by the Canadian taxpayer through the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the National Science and Engineering Research Council, and through donations administered by the Ontario Lung Association.

Avee Naidoo recognized for her research by the CIHR Institute of Aging.

As mentioned in an earlier post, Bowdish lab PhD student, Avee Naidoo, won the Fall 2014 CIHR Institute of Aging Anne Martin-Matthews Doctoral Research Prize of Excellence in Research on Aging and is mentioned in the CIHR’s Institute of Aging newsletter!

Avee Naidoo (PhD candidate) wins the Anne Martin-Matthews Doctoral Research Prize of Excellence in Research on Aging!

Congratulations to Avee Naidoo for winning the Anne Martin-Matthews Doctoral Research Prize of Excellence in Research on Aging! Avee’s work focuses on studying the role of the microenvironment on age and how this affects immune function in the elderly. Her research will help us to understand the mechanisms behind the impaired antibacterial function seen in the elderly, as well as lead to earlier prognosis of individuals at risk of chronic age related diseases.

Avee will be presented her award at this year’s Annual Scientific and Educational Meeting of the Canadian Association on Gerontology in Calgary, Alberta! She will also be a guest judge for the Student Poster Competition at the meeting so bring your A game!

Avee-med

 

Review: An introduction to automated flow cytometry gating tools and their implementation

An introduction to automated flow cytometry gating tools and their implementation

Chris Verschoor, Alinia Lelic, Jonathan Bramson & Dawn ME Bowdish

Frontiers in Immunology
Front. Immunol., 27 July 2015 | http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fimmu.2015.00380

Current flow cytometry (FCM) reagents and instrumentation allow for the measurement of an unprecedented number of parameters for any given cell within a homogenous or heterogeneous population. While this provides a great deal of power for hypothesis testing, it also generates a vast amount of data, which is typically analyzed manually through a processing called “gating.” For large experiments, such as high-content screens, in which many parameters are measured, the time required for manual analysis as well as the technical variability inherent to manual gating can increase dramatically, even becoming prohibitive depending on the clinical or research goal. In the following article, we aim to provide the reader an overview of automated FCM analysis as well as an example of the implementation of FLOw Clustering without K, a tool that we consider accessible to researchers of all levels of computational expertise. In most cases, computational assistance methods are more reproducible and much faster than manual gating, and for some, also allow for the discovery of cellular populations that might not be expected or evident to the researcher. We urge any researcher who is planning or has previously performed large FCM experiments to consider implementing computational assistance into their analysis pipeline.

For access to the .pdf click here.

 

Manuscript: The evolution of the scavenger receptor cysteine-rich domain of the class A scavenger receptors

Do you work out? Cause you’re built like a rock! A rock like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson! You have an impenetrable body thanks to your complex immune system. So how did you get such a sophisticated immune system?

In the Bowdish lab, we do more than just macrophage biology; we also study the evolution of the immune system! The scavenger receptors are a group of receptors that play an important role in your immune system by binding harmful bacteria. Our most recent publication by Yap et al., looks at how these receptors evolved and how evolution has changed their function. These receptors are found in various forms of life such as sharks, frogs, and mammals, but the function and appearance of these receptors has changed over time. Check out the open access….

Stearns JC, Davidson CJ, McKeon S, Whelan FJ, Fontes ME, Schryvers AB, Bowdish DM, Kellner JD, Surette MG. Culture and molecular-based profiles show shifts in bacterial communities of the upper respiratory tract that occur with age. ISME J. 2015 May;9(5):1268. doi: 10.1038/ismej.2015.49.

Stearns JC, Davidson CJ, McKeon S, Whelan FJ, Fontes ME, Schryvers AB, Bowdish DM, Kellner JD, Surette MG. Culture and molecular-based profiles show shifts in bacterial communities of the upper respiratory tract that occur with age. ISME J. 2015 May;9(5):1268. doi: 10.1038/ismej.2015.49.

Abstract: The upper respiratory tract (URT) is a crucial site for host defense, as it is home to bacterial communities that both modulate host immune defense and serve as a reservoir of potential pathogens. Young children are at high risk of respiratory illness, yet the composition of their URT microbiota is not well understood. Microbial profiling of the respiratory tract has traditionally focused on culturing common respiratory pathogens, whereas recent culture-independent microbiome profiling can only report the relative abundance of bacterial populations. In the current study, we used both molecular profiling of the bacterial 16S rRNA gene and laboratory culture to examine the bacterial diversity from the oropharynx and nasopharynx of 51 healthy children with a median age of 1.1 years (range 1–4.5 years) along with 19 accompanying parents. The resulting profiles suggest that in young children the nasopharyngeal microbiota, much like the gastrointestinal tract microbiome, changes from an immature state, where it is colonized by a few dominant taxa, to a more diverse state as it matures to resemble the adult microbiota. Importantly, this difference in bacterial diversity between adults and children accompanies a change in bacterial load of three orders of magnitude. This indicates that the bacterial communities in the nasopharynx of young children have a fundamentally different structure from those in adults and suggests that maturation of this community occurs sometime during the first few years of life, a period that includes ages at which children are at the highest risk for respiratory disease.

Yap N, Whelan FJ, Bowdish DM and Golding B (2015). The Evolution of the Scavenger Receptor Cysteine-Rich Domain of the Class A Scavenger Receptors. Front. Immunol. 6:342. doi: 10.3389/fimmu.2015.00342

Yap N, Whelan FJ, Bowdish DM and Golding B (2015). The Evolution of the Scavenger Receptor Cysteine-Rich Domain of the Class A Scavenger Receptors. Front. Immunol. 6:342. doi: 10.3389/fimmu.2015.00342

Abstract

The class A Scavenger Receptor (cA-SR) family is a group of five evolutionarily related innate immune receptors. The cA-SRs are known for their promiscuous ligand binding; as they have been shown to bind bacteria such as Streptococcus pneumoniae, and Escherichia coli, as well as different modified forms of low-density lipoprotein. Three of the five family members possess a Scavenger Receptor Cysteine Rich (SRCR) domain while the remaining two receptors lack the domain. Previous work has suggested that the Macrophage Associated Receptor with COllagenous structure (MARCO) shares a recent common ancestor with the non-SRCR-containing receptors; however the origin of the SRCR domain within the cA-SRs remains unknown. We hypothesize that the SRCR domains of the cA-SRs have a common origin that predates teleost fish. Using the newly available sequence data from sea lamprey and ghost shark genome projects, we have shown that MARCO shares a common ancestor with the SRCR-containing proteins. In addition, we explored the evolutionary relationships within the SRCR domain by reconstructing the ancestral SRCR domains of the cA-SRs. We identified a motif that is highly conserved between the cA-SR SRCR domains and the ancestral SRCR domain that consist of WGTVCDD. We also show that the GRAEVYY motif, a functionally important motif within MARCO, is poorly conserved in the other cA-SRs and in the reconstructed ancestral domain. Further, we identified three sites within MARCO’s SRCR domain which are under positive selection. Two of these sites lie adjacent to the conserved WGTVCDD motif, and may indicate a potential biological function for these sites. Together these findings indicate a common origin of the SRCR domain within the cA-SRs; however different selective pressures between the proteins may have caused MARCOs SRCR domain to evolve to contain different functional motifs when compared to the other SRCR-containing cA-SRs.