I had heard about the work from the Iolani School during one of the Nanopore Education Beta group meetings. Tonight, I watched Ethan C. Hill, a bioinformatician with the Iolani School, and Jaymie M. Frith, a 12th-year student, present at London Calling 2024. Their session was titled “Genome science in high-school classrooms: inflammation, glutamate and methylation.” They spoke about gene body methylation (GbM) and how it facilitates transcription elongation in some cases and can modulate alternative splicing. GbM, noted Hill, has been used as a proxy for inflammatory gene expression and personalized medicine in cancer. However, GbM has not been explored as much in inflammatory diseases, said Hill. Frith talked about cytokine production and how glutamate consumption may be related. The team worked with two patient samples: one arthritic patient and a healthy control. Blood was drawn three times. Sequencing was used to determine methyation levels and a panel of cytokines was assessed. Hill explained that they used a custom BED file containing 226 inflammatory genes for adaptive sampling. Differential gene body methylation of inflammatory-related genes was observed after glutamate consumption for several genes. The team used EPI2ME workflows and Wilcoxon Rank tests to analyze the data. Decreases in methylation were also observed for some genes. Cytokine concentrations for IL6 and IL8 correspond with an increase in GbM. The team concluded that “despite taking TNFa inhibitors, this arthritic individual was still experiencing extreme inflammation, so this case study shows that IL6 and IL8 could be contributing factors” and “… methylation changes in IL6 and IL8 could indicate that IL6 and IL8 inhibitors should be administered in addition to TNFa inhibitors.” The work was supported by NIH funding and is an example of the inspiring work students can perform!
