Wilmore C Webley

University of Massachusetts Amherst | UMass Amherst · Department of Microbiology

Trachoma is the leading cause of infectious blindness worldwide. Ocular infection by the obligate intracellular pathogen, Chlamydia trachomatis, causes the eyelashes to turn in and scratch the cornea, leading to blindness if left untreated. The disease is most prevalent in poor, rural communities that lack the infrastructure for basic hygiene, clea...

The cover image is based on the Review Article Bronchoscopy in Severe Childhood Asthma: Irresponsible or Irreplaceable? by Megan Januska et al., https://doi.org/10.1002/ppul.24569.

The cover image is based on the Review Article Bronchoscopy in Severe Childhood Asthma: Irresponsible or Irreplaceable? by Megan Januska et al., https://doi.org/10.1002/ppul.24569

For children with severe asthma, guideline‐based management focuses on the escalation of anti‐inflammatory and bronchodilatory medications while addressing comorbid conditions. Bronchoscopy, in this context, has been relegated to ruling out asthma mimickers. More recently, however, there have been questions surrounding the clinical utility of bronc...

Background: Hepoxilins are biologically active metabolites of arachidonic acid that are formed through the 12-lipoxygenase pathway. Hepoxilin A3 is now known to be an important regulator of mucosal inflammation in response to infection by bacterial pathogens and was recently identified as a potent neutrophil chemoattractant in the intestinal mucosa...

Asthma is a chronic respiratory disease characterized by reversible airway obstruction and airway hyperresponsiveness to non-specific bronchoconstriction agonists as the primary underlying pathophysiology. The worldwide incidence of asthma has increased dramatically in the last 40 years. According to World Health Organization (WHO) estimates, over...

The hygiene hypothesis supports an inverse relationship between respiratory infections in early-life and atopic diseases. However, a recent study supports growing evidence that early-life infection and airway microbiome composition can significantly influence asthma inception and exacerbation later in life. This reignites discussions on infection-m...

Title: Delta­Tocotrienol Reduces Susceptibility to Chlamydial Infection in Macrophages and Lung Epithelial Cells

Background: Several Chlamydia pneumoniae (Cp) biomarkers have been associated with asthma but Cp-specific IgE (Cp IgE) has not been investigated extensively. Our objective was to investigate Cp IgE in community adult asthma patients. Methods: (1) Prevalence of Cp IgE (measured by immunoblotting) and Cp DNA (by polymerase chain reaction) in peripher...

Asthma is a chronic respiratory disease whose etiology is poorly understood. Recent studies suggest that early-life respiratory infections with atypical bacteria may play an important role in the induction or exacerbation of chronic respiratory disease. The current study utilized a neonatal mouse ovalbumin (OVA) sensitization model of asthma to det...

Chlamydia trachomatis is the leading cause of bacterial sexually transmitted disease worldwide and while antibiotic treatment is effective in eliminating the pathogen, up to 70% of all infections are asymptomatic. Despite sustained efforts over the past 2 decades, an effective chlamydial vaccine remains elusive, due in large part to the lack of an...

Several Chlamydia pneumoniae (Cp) biomarkers have been associated with asthma but Cp-specific IgE (Cp IgE) has not been investigated extensively. Our objective was to investigate Cp IgE in community adult asthma patients. (1) Prevalence of Cp IgE (measured by immunoblotting) and Cp DNA (by polymerase chain reaction) in peripheral blood, and biomark...

Background: Recent studies have confirmed the presence of viable Chlamydia in the bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL) fluid of pediatric patients with airway hyperresponsiveness. While specific IgG and IgM responses to C. pneumoniae are well described, the response and potential contribution of Ag-specific IgE are not known. The current study sought to d...

Alpha1-antitrypsin Deficiency (AATD) is a rare hereditary disorder with a prevalence of about 1/5000 individuals in Italy. Deficient patients are at a higher risk to develop lung emphysema at an early age and liver cirrhosis. The low prevalence of AATD suggested the establishment of a registry with the aim to learn more details about the natural hi...

Recently, much attention has been given to the possible role played by pathogens that colonize neonatal or paediatric airway and their potential involvement in chronic respiratory disease. The goal of the current study was to evaluate the prevalence of Mycoplasma organisms in the BAL fluid of paediatric patients suffering from a variety of chronic...

Neutrophilic asthma is thought to be less responsive than eosinophilic asthma to anti-inflammatory therapies including corticosteroids. Chlamydia pneumoniae has been implicated in asthma, possibly by induction of interleukin (IL-8). We hypothesized that IL-8 is increased in the bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL) fluid from children with asthma and C. pne...

An emerging body of evidence suggests that half of asthma in both children and adults is associated with chronic lung infection. The aim of the present study was to determine the frequency of viable Chlamydia pneumoniae (Cp) and C. trachomatis (Ct) in the respiratory tracts of paediatric patients with chronic respiratory diseases. Bronchoalveolar l...

PURPOSE: Mycoplasma is an important mucosal pathogen of the respiratory and urogenital tracts in humans. The goal of this study was to determine the identity of Mycoplasma species in the bronchial lavage fluid [BAL] of pediatric patients with chronic respiratory diseases. METHODS: In this study BAL fluid obtained with fiberoptic bronchoscopy techni...

Asthma is a chronic respiratory disease that currently affects approximately 16 million Americans each year. Airway inflammation is a hallmark of asthma presentation and is believed to arise from various stimuli including bacterial infections, such as Chlamydia. The goal of this project was to explore the hypothesis that Chlamydia infects a variety...

PURPOSE: Chlamydia and Mycoplasma species have been previously linked to various acute and chronic respiratory diseases. The objective of this study was to determine the frequency of Mycoplasma and Chlamydia species carriage in bronchial lavage fluid [BAL] from pediatric patients with chronic respiratory disease. METHODS: We obtained BAL fluid from...

Chlamydia pneumoniae (Cp) is an obligate intracellular pathogen associated with a variety of maladies. Best known for its involvement in community-acquired pneumonia outbreaks; the potential role of Cp in diverse illnesses is a topic of increasing interest and investigation. Previous studies suggested that white blood cells from normal blood donors...

Introduction: Chlamydiae are obligate intracellular respiratory pathogens which cause a wide variety of human disease. C. pneumoniae (Cp) and C. trachomatis (Ct) have been reported as possible contributing factors to chronic respiratory disease pathogenesis. We sought to determine the prevalence of Cp and Ct in a cohort of children undergoing diagn...

Chlamydia trachomatis (Ct) and Chlamydia pneumoniae (Cp) are medically significant infectious agents associated with various chronic human pathologies. Nevertheless, specific roles in disease progression or initiation are incompletely defined. Both pathogens infect established cell lines in vitro and polymerase chain reaction (PCR) has detected Chl...

There has been a worldwide increase in the incidence of asthma, and the disease has greatly impacted the public health care system. Chlamydia pneumoniae has been reported as a possible contributing factor in asthma. The organism has been detected by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) in bronchial tissue, but there has been no direct evidence of viabil...

The chlamydial species are Gram-negative bacterial pathogens critical to human health. Their developmental cycle is associated with the formation and release of the broadly conserved glycolipid exoantigen (GLXA), which has been implicated in the chlamydial elementary body-host cell interaction. This study examines the potential surface display of t...

Lipid raft domains form in plasma membranes of eukaryotic cells by the tight packing of glycosphingolipids and cholesterol. Caveolae are invaginated structures that form in lipid raft domains when the protein caveolin-1 is expressed. The Chlamydiaceae are obligate intracellular bacterial pathogens that replicate entirely within inclusions that deve...

Background: There has been a worldwide increase in the incidence of asthma and the disease has great impact on the public health care system. Chlamydophila pneumoniae (Cp) an obligate intracellular, respiratory pathogen has been reported as a possible contributing factor in asthma. To date, the organism has been detected by PCR in bronchial tissue...

Obligate intracellular bacterial pathogens of the genus Chlamydia are reported to enter host cells by both clathrin-dependent and clathrin-independent processes. C. trachomatis serovar K recently was shown to enter cells via caveolae-like lipid raft domains. We asked here how widespread raft-mediated entry might be among the Chlamydia. We show that...

Typescript. Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 2003. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 148-162).