Biology subjects

Li, J. C.

Publications and source records attributed to Li, J. C..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2025

GPR15 and CD38 define a subset of peripheral blood pathogenic effector Th2 cells associated with active eosinophilic esophagitis

Eosinophilic esophagitis (EoE) is a chronic allergic disease driven by exposure to culprit antigens. Due to the local nature of the inflammation, diagnosis and assessment are limited to invasive procedures. Based on prior single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data linking peripheral GPR15+ pathogenic effector Th2 (peTh2) cells to esophageal tissue peTh2s, we hypothesized the direct involvement of GPR15+ peTh2 cells in EoE pathogenesis and aimed to further evaluate their association with EoE disease status. We subjected samples from subjects with or without EoE to flow cytometry (n = 74 peripheral blood, 17 biopsy) and scRNA-seq (n = 27 peripheral blood, 10 biopsy). Expression of GPR15 by peripheral peTh2 cells was increased in EoE, and these cells expressed increased CD38 in active EoE--findings recapitulated in esophageal biopsies. We also identified a peTh2-associated, CD38-containing gene expression program that peripheral GPR15+ peTh2 cells upregulated in active EoE. The level of upregulation was distinct from other circulating peTh2 cells and was more similar to that seen in esophageal peTh2 cells. An association between expression of GPR15 by peripheral peTh2 cells, the aryl hydrocarbon receptor was strongest in subjects with EoE, suggesting an environmental exposure or susceptibility. The magnitude of GPR15 expression by peripheral peTh2 cells could effectively in discriminate active EoE from no EoE in our study population (AUC 0.93). Our data suggest that EoE-related peTh2 cells are identifiable and accessible in the peripheral blood, and could be exploited in both clinical practice as a non-invasive biomarker and continued investigation into mechanisms driving EoE. One sentence summaryGPR15 marks a subset of peripheral blood pathogenic effector Th2 cells associated with eosinophilic esophagitis (EoE) that upregulate CD38 during active disease - an observation that has potential to be used for non-invasive diagnosis and monitoring of EoE and that has suggests new mechanisms driving this increasingly prevalent allergic disease.

immunology↗

bioRxiv2025

Predicting functional constraints across evolutionary timescales with phylogeny-informed genomic language models

Genomic language models (gLMs) have emerged as a powerful approach for learning genome-wide functional constraints directly from DNA sequences. However, standard gLMs adapted from natural language processing often require extremely large model sizes and computational resources, yet still fall short of classical evolutionary models in predictive tasks. Here, we introduce GPN-Star (Genomic Pretrained Network with Species Tree and Alignment Representation), a biologically grounded gLM featuring a phylogeny-aware architecture that leverages whole-genome alignments and species trees to model evolutionary relationships explicitly. Trained on alignments spanning vertebrate, mammalian, and primate evolutionary timescales, GPN-Star achieves state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of variant effect prediction tasks in both coding and non-coding regions of the human genome. Analyses across timescales reveal task-dependent advantages of modeling more recent versus deeper evolution. To demonstrate its potential to advance human genetics, we show that GPN-Star substantially outperforms prior methods in prioritizing pathogenic and fine-mapped GWAS variants; yields unprecedented enrichments of complex trait heritability; and improves power in rare variant association testing. Extending beyond humans, we train GPN-Star for five model organisms - Mus musculus, Gallus gallus, Drosophila melanogaster, Caenorhabditis elegans, and Arabidopsis thaliana - demonstrating the robustness and generalizability of the framework. Taken together, these results position GPN-Star as a scalable, powerful, and flexible new tool for genome interpretation, well suited to leverage the growing abundance of comparative genomics data.

bioinformatics↗

bioRxiv2020

Bacteriophage uptake by Eukaryotic cell layers represents a major sink for phages during therapy

For over 100 years, bacteriophages have been known as viruses that infect bacteria. Yet it is becoming increasingly apparent that bacteriophages, or phages for short, have tropisms outside their bacterial hosts. During phage therapy, high doses of phages are directly administered and disseminated throughout the body, facilitating broad interactions with eukaryotic cells. Using live cell imaging across a range of cell lines we demonstrate that cell type plays a major role in phage internalisation and that smaller phages (< 100 nm) are internalised at higher rates. Uptake rates were validated under physiological shear stress conditions using a microfluidic device that mimics the shear stress to which endothelial cells are exposed to in the human body. Phages were found to rapidly adhere to eukaryotic cell layers, with adherent phages being subsequently internalised by macropinocytosis and functional phages accumulating and stably persisting intracellularly. Finally, we incorporate these results into an established pharmacokinetic model demonstrating the potential impact of phage accumulation by these cell layers, which represents a major sink for circulating phages in the body. Understanding these interactions will have important implications on innate immune responses, phage pharmacokinetics, and the efficacy of phage therapy.

microbiology↗