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Andrew Li

Publications and source records attributed to Andrew Li.

2 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2026

Dual-transcriptomic analysis of human nasal transcriptome and microbiome reveals host-bacteria associations in symptomatic respiratory infection.

BACKGROUND: The human nasopharynx is colonized by a diverse community of commensal microbiota linked to many respiratory diseases, yet their associations with the host remain unclear. RESULTS: In this study, we introduced a dual-transcriptomics analysis strategy, which can characterize the host transcriptome and microbiome from nasal samples simultaneously. We applied this workflow to a local SARS-CoV-2 cohort with 76 asymptomatic infected patients, among whom 52 (68.42%) developed symptomatic infection during a 1-week follow-up period. Nasal swabs were collected from all 76 patients at enrollment and from 73 patients at one-week later follow-up. We detected a median of 8.94% reads that did not map to the human genome across all 149 samples, among which around half (median 49.68%) were successfully mapped to microbiome genome. Meta-transcriptomic analysis detected significantly higher SARS-related coronavirus loads in samples from the symptomatic group at enrollment (P&#x2009;=&#x2009;0.004), and both groups showed decreased loads one week later (symptomatic, P&#x2009;=&#x2009;0.001; asymptomatic, P&#x2009;=&#x2009;0.035). Compared with benchmarking 16&#xa0;S rRNA sequencing on 53 samples, our computational strategy showed high correlation of relative abundance in all top 20 genera (median Rho&#x2009;=&#x2009;0.90, Pmax < 0.001). A total of 670 bacteria species were identified to show a relative abundance&#x2009;&#x2265;&#x2009;0.01% in at least 10% samples. Differential abundance analysis identified 76 species (DASs) from six phyla with significantly decreased abundance in samples from the symptomatic group (log2(fold change or FC) < -1 and adjusted P&#x2009;<&#x2009;0.05) compared to the asymptomatic group at enrollment. Integrating these symptom-associated DASs with host's gene expression using an expression quantitative trait bacteria (eQTB) model, we found 45 symptom-associated DASs identified at enrollment were significantly associated with one to 14 genes (adjusted P&#x2009;<&#x2009;0.05). GSEA showed a series of symptom-associated DASs were significantly correlated with pathways related to olfactory function, keratinocyte differentiation, and DNA methylation. CONCLUSIONS: In summary, our dual-transcriptomic analysis strategy effectively characterized host-microbiome associations, offering insights into microbial contributions to respiratory diseases.

Humans↗
PubMed2025

Multi-omic phenotyping of iPSC-derived neurons harboring the MAPT V337M mutation reveals tau hypophosphorylation and perturbed axon morphology pathways.

Tau aggregation is a hallmark of several neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer's disease and frontotemporal dementia. There are disease-causing variants of the tau-encoding gene, MAPT, and the presence of tau aggregates is highly correlated with disease progression. However, the molecular mechanisms linking pathological tau to neuronal dysfunction are not well understood. This is in part due to an incomplete understanding of the normal functions of tau in development and aging, and how the associated molecular and cellular processes change in the context of causal disease variants of tau. To address these questions in an unbiased manner, we conducted multi-omic characterization of iPSC-derived neurons harboring the MAPT V337M mutation or MAPT knockdown. RNA-seq and phosphoproteomics revealed that both V337M mutation and tau knockdown perturbed levels of transcripts and phosphorylation of proteins related to axonogenesis or axon morphology. Surprisingly, we found that neurons with V337M tau had much lower tau phosphorylation than neurons with WT tau. Functional genomics screens uncovered regulators of tau phosphorylation in neurons and found that factors involved in axonogenesis modified tau phosphorylation in both MAPT WT and MAPT V337M neurons. Intriguingly, the p38 MAPK pathway specifically modified tau phosphorylation in MAPT V337M neurons. We propose that V337M tau perturbs tau phosphorylation and axon morphology pathways that are relevant to the normal function of tau, which could contribute to previously reported cognitive changes in preclinical MAPT variant carriers.

Journal Article↗