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New advances in understanding how CF lung infections develop
What is their research about?
The researchers are interested in understanding where the bugs that cause CF infections come from and how the infections are passed on. What they find out can be used in the future to prevent people from becoming infected. Knowing the source of the infection can also help doctors and researchers develop better medicines for treating them.
To find out more, Dr Chris Ruis, Professors Julian Parkhill and Andres Floto and colleagues are studying patterns in the DNA of infection-causing bugs. They are particularly interested in the bug Mycobacterium abscessus, part of the NTM group of bacteria that cause serious lung infections in people with CF.
How did they study infection-causing bugs?
The researchers at the University of Cambridge have pioneered a method for studying the DNA of bugs by analysing patterns of changes to their DNA known as ‘mutational spectra’.
While mutational spectra are used in medicine to understand different cancers, Trust-funded researchers at the CF Innovation Hub were the first to show their value in understanding infections. The results of their latest research using this type of analysis were published in the prestigious journal Nature Communications earlier in the month.
Mutational spectra are made up of sets of unique patterns of small changes in DNA known as ‘mutational signatures’. Each signature tells researchers something different about the bug – for example, the chemicals it has been exposed to and, therefore, where it has been living.
In their latest studies, the researchers looked at mutational signature patterns from lots of different infection-causing bacteria (e.g. M. abscessus, Pseudomonas aeruginosa and many others). Across all of the bacteria they looked at, they identified a specific mutational signature that was always associated with lung infection. This allowed them to say that the bacteria showing these signatures transmit between people rather than being acquired from the environment.
The mutational signatures of M. abscessus from samples from people with CF confirmed earlier studies showing that the bacteria are passed on from one person to another.
This is the strongest evidence we have that the source of M. abscessus infection, and other pathogens, in people’s lungs, is from other people with the same lung infection, rather than developing the infection from the environment
Professor Julian Parkhill, University of Cambridge
We’ve created a software analysis tool to enable other researchers to calculate mutational spectra for any pathogen (disease-causing bug). It’s freely available, and we hope it will be used by other researchers so we can learn together how the analysis of mutational spectra can help us tackle new and existing infections
Dr Chris Ruis, University of Cambridge
Read more about this research in the full article here: Ruis, C., Weimann, A., Tonkin-Hill, G. et al. Mutational spectra are associated with bacterial niche. Nat Commun 14, 7091 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-42916-w
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