The Metabolomic Signatures of HAND

Throughout the span of nearly 30 years, the treatment for HIV has progressed from being considered a death sentence to now allowing people living with HIV (PLWH) to live longer and fulfilling lives(1). While current treatments for HIV can stop the progression of HIV, they are not able to cure the disease altogether and the consequence of a longer lifespan among the PLWH population is the emergence of chronic pathogens due to the long term exposure of HIV(1). In regards to HIV in the nervous system, one of the most prevalent pathogens affecting PLWH is that of HIV Associated Neurocognitive Disorder (HAND). Around 30-50% of people with HIV experience symptoms of HAND to varying degrees. Symptoms include impairments in cognitive, behavioral, and motor functions2. While HIV treatments can reduce the severity of these symptoms, there are still the prevalent challenges for distinguishing the disease from other neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease (AD)3. Furthermore, there is a disparity regarding our knowledge on the underlying metabolites for HAND that drives the progression of the disease3. Thus differentiating the metabolomic profiles between HIV and HAND is the focus of this study. The profiles were compared for similarities and differences through the cohort groups of plasma and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) from patients of varying levels of HIV and cognitive statuses

ReDU: a framework to find and reanalyze public mass spectrometry data

We present ReDU (https://redu.ucsd.edu/), a system for metadata capture of public mass spectrometry-based metabolomics data, with validated controlled vocabularies. Systematic capture of knowledge enables the reanalysis of public data and/or co-analysis of one’s own data. ReDU enables multiple types of analyses, including finding chemicals and associated metadata, comparing the shared and different chemicals between groups of samples, and metadata-filtered, repository-scale molecular networking. © 2020, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature America, Inc