Complex carbohydrates catabolism capacity of bladder microbiota inhabiting healthy and overactive female bladders.

Overactive bladder syndrome (OAB) is a poorly understood symptom complex that affects 40% of females over the age of 40, with clinical features including urinary urgency and incontinence. In addition to inflammation, oxidative stress, nerve damage and reduced blood flow, alterations in the urinary microbiome (urobiome), specifically in bladder bacterial diversity, have been reported to be associated with OAB. Bladder bacteria are members of the urobiome along with viruses, archaea, fungi, and protozoans.

Forming Consensus To Advance Urobiome Research.

Urobiome research has the potential to advance the understanding of a wide range of diseases, including lower urinary tract symptoms and kidney disease. Many scientific areas have benefited from early research method consensus to facilitate the greater, common good. This consensus document, developed by a group of expert investigators currently engaged in urobiome research (UROBIOME 2020 conference participants), aims to promote standardization and advances in this field by the adoption of common core research practices.

Representing glycophenotypes: semantic unification of glycobiology resources for disease discovery.

While abnormalities related to carbohydrates (glycans) are frequent for patients with rare and undiagnosed diseases as well as in many common diseases, these glycan-related phenotypes (glycophenotypes) are not well represented in knowledge bases (KBs). If glycan-related diseases were more robustly represented and curated with glycophenotypes, these could be used for molecular phenotyping to help to realize the goals of precision medicine. Diagnosis of rare diseases by computational cross-species comparison of genotype-phenotype data has been facilitated by leveraging ontological representations of clinical phenotypes, using Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO), and model organism ontologies such as Mammalian Phenotype Ontology (MP) in the context of the Monarch Initiative.