Michal Tal, PhD

Finally online - sharing our findings that #Lyme disease bacteria can live in female reproductive organs for over a year and increase risk for gynecological disease!!! We found this increased risk in mice and humans! 😱 (thread below) medrxiv.org/content/10.110…

@tarstarr Looks like you're the odd (wo)man out either way.

I guess I should pay for premium…?

It's GWAS days. Another large GWAS preprint (213,869 cases and 1,646,967 controls!) tackles another major medical need: recurrent urinary tract infections. The analysis identifies 36 non-HLA loci, highlighting the importance of host immune responses and epithelial urinary defense. Among the prioritized genes is PSCA, whose expression is enriched in the urinary epithelium. Notably, the same variants appear to protect against both recurrent UTIs and gastrointestinal infections, pointing to shared epithelial defense mechanisms.

I couldn’t be prouder to announce that @tanmana_mitra’s thesis work identifying how metabolic demand drives terminal T cell exhaustion is out today in @ImmunityCP : authors.elsevier.com/a/1nQx93qNrV3W…

#LongCOVID may be leaving behind visible damage to the body’s “rest-and-digest” nervous system. ➡️ For the first time, researchers have demonstrated structural loss of cholinergic (vagal) nerve fibers in the stomach lining of LongCOVID patients. ➡️ The reduction correlated with heart rate variability, providing anatomical evidence for the dysautonomia that many patients experience. 1/

Proud to share our group’s new paper in Experimental & Molecular Medicine. I am grateful to the team and collaborators for bringing this work together. We show that urolithin A ameliorates HFpEF cardiac remodeling by activating AMPK-mTOR-ULK1 mitophagy signaling and remodeling the gut microbiome-ceramide axis, reducing mitochondrial dysfunction, lipotoxic stress, fibrosis, and diastolic impairment. A mechanism-based mitochondria-targeted strategy for HFpEF. DOI: doi.org/10.1038/s12276…

New study shows Urolithin A improved heart failure through two mechanisms: 1) it activated mitophagy (cleanup of damaged mitochondria) 2) it shifted the gut microbiome to contain less ceramide Mouse/human heart cell model, but would be interested to see for #LongCovid!

@dysclinic We had to change the name of our control group from healthy controls to recovered controls in our MAESTRO study. "Healthy" would be a stretch for describing our control group at this point. The key piece for our control group was neither COVID nor Lyme was life altering for them.

The concept of "healthy controls" has been challenged greatly by #COVID_19 infection. People who consider themselves recovered exhibit measurable altered physiology compared to "healthy controls" before the pandemic. I've seen this in different studies on different topics. 🧠🔬

@einfachkaffee @CapillaryIo @Naomi_D_Harvey @bcgraciatello @NobleRingleader They should be dirt cheap. I'll think on it. Do most people have access to a 3D printer? Here in the US we have 3D printers in most public libraries. But I don't know about elsewhere. Or could we have people use an image on a smart phone to calibrate? Any ideas @CapillaryIo?

@ImmunoFever @CapillaryIo @Naomi_D_Harvey @bcgraciatello @NobleRingleader oh, thanks for the keyword! They are around 20€ish on amazon and should work well for this purpose. Do you know of any cheaper alternatives?

Gibt es hier jemanden, die oder der ein selbst aufgenommenes Bild der Nagelbettkapillare grob bewerten kann?

Welcome to discount public health everyone! Why can't we find the source of the cyclosporiasis outbreak you ask? You can't find what you don't test for.

@einfachkaffee @CapillaryIo @Naomi_D_Harvey @bcgraciatello @NobleRingleader I'm wondering though for calibration for images that will be taken of a curved surface rather than round, wouldn't a film work well? Like one of the Microscope Micrometer Calibration Ruler Films?

@ImmunoFever @CapillaryIo @Naomi_D_Harvey @bcgraciatello @NobleRingleader Hm. I just thought that I have thin wires with known cross sections like 0.02mm - would that work as a ruler in the image? Though it has a very thin insulation, so the actual diameter is closer to 0.03mm (I can try burning it off though)

1/3 Just another link to one of our latest papers: How do prothrombotic (amyloidogenic) microclot complexes form and what do they tell us once present? Are these complexes the single cause of a particular disease? nature.com/articles/s4141…

@einfachkaffee @CapillaryIo @Naomi_D_Harvey @bcgraciatello @NobleRingleader Oh that's a great idea, and some of these rulers are included with different capillaroscopes we've tested. I'll make a note which ones include a ruler, but you're right that even a sticker could work! At this point I think we've bought every capillaroscope on Amazon!!!

@CapillaryIo @Naomi_D_Harvey @ImmunoFever @bcgraciatello @NobleRingleader Something like a calibrated micrometer sticker would be nice and accessible, though I couldn’t find anything below 0.5mm printed when looking online.

Last year some regrettable cost cutting decisions were made about foodborne pathogen testing, ending 28 years of screening for cyclosporiasis and quickly catching and quenching several outbreaks. Now we still have no idea what the source of this outbreak is. This is the price!!!

This aged well. Welcome to discount foodborne pathogen testing folks!

A year ago, CDC made Cyclospora surveillance optional. It had been tracked for 28 years. Today: ~3,000 cases across 31 states, no confirmed source, and CDC’s own count (843) is trailing what states are reporting by thousands.

@DdelAlamo How many single author manuscripts have there been? Are they increasing? It's so rare in biology unless you include commentaries and reviews.

ChatGPT 5.6 Sol helped me confirm a hypothesis I've had for years: the fraction of single-author scientific manuscripts that use "we" instead of "I" (or no pronouns at all) has meaningfully increased over the last few decades

Day 23 of calcium channel blockers for my vasospasms. I had a great night sleep and woke up with morning energy. NO PEM despite swimming in the sea for an hour and walking 5000 steps. I reduced TCA from 25 to 10 mg and already see an improvement in my HRV. I don’t know what it’s doing to me, but it’s not good. My mind also feels a bit more clear. I have a disability hearing today should I live stream it? They’ve been claiming they can reduce my payments by 33% due to “attributable risk” of illnesses they think contributed to me getting “long Covid”. It’s been 3 years of nonsense from them. This is the “ultimate” doctors committee to review my case. They allow me to bring a doctor with me, and I had hoped Emilio would be with me.

@bcgraciatello @Naomi_D_Harvey @NobleRingleader @einfachkaffee @CapillaryIo And I was so excited to hear through this very thread that you are! We must all catch up again to discuss as I think it's so vital for people, not just clinics, to have access to these kinds of analytics.

@bcgraciatello @Naomi_D_Harvey @NobleRingleader @einfachkaffee Indeed! And Eduardo @CapillaryIo has been great to work from the moment we started adding capillaroscopy to the MIT MAESTRO study! I was under the impression that you guys were not able to /intending to support the low res /low mag images discussed here x.com/i/status/20755…

"The first step of any project is to grossly underestimate its complexity and difficulty." — Nicoll Hunt