Researchers from the Advancing Innovation in Respiratory (AIR) team at Wal-yan Respiratory Centre – a powerhouse partnership between The Kids Research Institute Australia, Perth Children’s Hospital Foundation and Perth Children’s Hospital – have developed a powerful new tool to help predict asthma risk in children, before symptoms even begin.
The tool, called target-methylseq-qc, was designed by Dr Patricia Agudelo Romero and colleagues to streamline the analysis of DNA methylation, a type of biological information that can reveal important clues about a child’s underlying vulnerability to disease.
This work is part of the broader AERIAL (Airway Epithelium Respiratory Illnesses and Allergy) study, which follows 460 families from the ORIGINS longitudinal birth cohort study, from late pregnancy through early childhood to better understand why some children develop asthma.
“Our goal is to identify early warning signs that might tell us which children are more likely to develop asthma,” Dr Agudelo Romero said.
“If we can do that before symptoms begin, we have a better chance of preventing the disease or reducing its severity.”
To achieve this, researchers study samples from the placenta and nasal swabs from children, looking for conserved patterns in the airway lining known as epithelial signatures. These molecular patterns may reflect vulnerabilities to asthma history and environmental exposures during pregnancy that increase asthma risk.
The target-methylseq-qc pipeline was built specifically to process data from targeted DNA methylation sequencing, a newer, high-resolution method for examining these biological signatures. The tool checks the quality and coverage of the data to ensure reliable results.
While developed for epigenetic analysis, the pipeline’s flexible design makes it valuable for other types of targeted sequencing data, extending its use beyond respiratory health.
Early findings using the tool were presented at the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology (AAAAI) conference in Washington last year, and further studies are underway.
Ultimately, the team hopes the insights gained from this kind of analysis could lead to a simple, non-invasive test to identify asthma risk early.