Karen Pendergrass, Standards Team

Fungal pathogens rely on metal acquisition for virulence. This review reveals how host tissues manipulate iron, copper, zinc, and manganese to starve or intoxicate fungi and how pathogens adapt, with implications for antifungal therapy and microbiome-targeted interventions.

Nickel-dependent enzymes like urease and hydrogenase are essential for pathogen virulence. This review outlines the mechanisms by which pathogens acquire and utilize nickel and explores implications for therapy and microbiome balance.

Metformin is a synthetic derivative of guanidine derived from the guanidine alkaloid of the plant Galega officinalis L. with significant hypoglycemic effects. It is a first-line antihyperglycemic agent due to its efficacy, low cost, and favorable safety profile.

This review highlights how neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s disease (D), Parkinson’s disease (D), and dementia with Lewy bodies (LB) exhibit disease-specific metallomic signatures, with copper depletion as a shared feature. Metal imbalances reflect both cause and consequence in neurodegeneration and may offer diagnostic potential when captured through region-specific elemental analysis.

Dementia with Lewy bodies (LB) brains show widespread copper depletion and region-specific sodium, manganese, iron, and selenium alterations. While copper loss is common to D and DD, LB presents a distinct metallomic fingerprint, enabling disease differentiation via CA. Metallomic profiling may aid in diagnosing overlapping dementias and reveals unique pathophysiological signatures.

This study identifies a distinct urinary metallomic signature in pancreatic cancer patients, marked by altered calcium, magnesium, copper, and zinc levels, along with lighter zinc isotopic composition. These findings suggest that non-invasive urine tests could enable early DAC detection by leveraging trace metal imbalances and stable isotope shifts.

A metallomic signature is the condition-specific profile of trace metals and metal-binding molecules that reflects disrupted metal homeostasis.

This literature review maps the microbiome signature of endometriosis across multiple body sites, revealing distinct taxa enriched or depleted in patients compared to controls, highlighting microbial shifts by disease stage, site, and taxa. 

Facultative anaerobes are microorganisms—primarily bacteria—that possess the metabolic flexibility to grow in both the presence and absence of oxygen.