CBRI Seminar – Quin Wills – 3rd June 2016

Nature, Nietzsche and Nurture: single-cell sequencing, imaging and culture of gene edited macrophages to study inflammation

Technical improvements in single-cell perturbation, live-cell imaging and single-cell sequencing are enabling the detailed dissection of heterogeneous inflammatory cell states. Combining all three modalities with the new Polaris lab-on-chip platform, we are performing temporal studies of CRISPR-edited macrophage responses to inflammatory perturbation and HIV infection. While macrophages have poorly understood predetermined inflammatory phenotypes (their ‘nature’), they are also highly plastic to microenvironmental cues (‘nurture’). I’ll discuss surprising results around a third axis (which I call the ‘Nietzsche effect’) that can now be studied thanks to single-cell approaches.