Feargal J. Ryan

Gut-immune signaling drives blood-brain barrier damage in pediatric allogeneic stem cell transplant

This study identifies immune signaling and gut microbiota-derived metabolites as drivers of blood-brain barrier damage in pediatric allo-HSCT recipients.

Bladder mucosal afferents detect UTI and aid pathogen clearance

This study identifies bladder mucosal afferents as key sensors of UTI, showing they drive pain and urinary frequency during infection, aiding bacterial clearance.

OpusTaxa: A Unified Workflow for Taxonomic Profiling, Assembly, and Functional Analysis of Shotgun Metagenomes

OpusTaxa provides an open-source workflow for streamlined shotgun metagenomic analysis, enabling taxonomic profiling, assembly, and functional analysis with minimal user configuration.

TaxSEA: an R package for rapid interpretation of differential abundance analysis output.

TaxSEA provides an R package for taxon set enrichment analysis to interpret differential abundance results in microbiome studies.

Cardiovascular symptoms of PASC are associated with trace-level cytokines that affect the function of human pluripotent stem cell derived cardiomyocytes

This study identifies trace-level cytokines in PASC patients linked to cardiovascular symptoms and shows their impact on cardiomyocyte function using nanotechnology detection.

Engineered bacteria detect tumor DNA

This paper engineers bacteria to detect tumor DNA through horizontal gene transfer, achieving 100% discrimination between mice with and without colorectal cancer.

A systems immunology study comparing innate and adaptive immune responses in adults to COVID-19 mRNA (BNT162b2/mRNA-1273) and adenovirus vectored vaccines (ChAdOx1-S) after the first, second and third doses

This study compares innate and adaptive immune responses to two COVID-19 vaccines in adults after multiple doses, identifying differences linked to antibody, T cell responses, and reactogenicity.

Long-term perturbation of the peripheral immune system months after SARS-CoV-2 infection

The paper examines immune system changes in individuals recovering from SARS-CoV-2 infection up to 24 weeks post-infection, finding persistent immune and metabolic dysregulation linked to long COVID symptoms.

Choice of assembly software has a critical impact on virome characterisation

This study compares 16 virome assembly tools across four datasets, finding that SPAdes (meta) performs best, but all assemblers have limitations due to low coverage and repeats.