Christopher Lear, Joanne Davidson, Georgia Mackay, Paul Drury, Robert Galinsky, Josine Quaedackers, Alistair Gunn and Laura Bennet have published a paper entitled ‘Antenatal dexamethasone before asphyxia promotes cystic neural injury in preterm fetal sheep by inducing hyperglycemia’, Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism, 2017
Antenatal glucocorticoids were developed in Auckland by Liggins and Howie and are now universally recommended to improve short-term outcomes after premature birth. Surprisingly, it is still very unclear how they affect neurodevelopmental outcomes after high-risk pregnancies, as they were often excluded from randomized trials. This study illustrated that exposure to antenatal glucocorticoids dramatically worsened brain damage after severe asphyxia. They also showed that this detrimental effect was mediated by increased blood sugar levels. This finding strongly suggests that it is important to explore the role of antenatal glucocorticoids for high-risk subgroups.
Jacelyn M.S. Loh, Jia-Yun Catherine Tsai and Thomas Proft published a paper entitled ‘The ability of Group A Streptococcus to adhere to immortalised human skin versus throat cell lines does not reflect their predicted tissue tropism’ in Clinical Microbiology and Infection (IF 5.2).
Genotyping of the emm gene for Group A Streptococcus has for decades been used to predict a particular tissue tropism. This has often been associated with adhesive attributes of the pathogen. Our functional adhesion assays described in this manuscript challenges this view and highlights the gaps that still remain in our knowledge between molecular markers of disease and mechanisms of virulence.
Vaidyanathan, Venkatesh (PhD student, Discipline of Nutrition and Dietetics, and Auckland Cancer Society Research Centre) et al., published a research article in Molecular Biosystems, published by Royal Society of Chemistry, UK. The article titled ‘Environmental factors and risk of aggressive prostate cancer among a population of New Zealand men – a genotypic approach’ has been shortlisted as “Hot Article in Molecular Biosystems, 2017”, and featured in the front cover of the latest issue. This is a multi-author research article and has collaborators across a number of departments in FMHS, and in AUT and ADHB.