Defining the Plasticity of Myeloid Cells in Health and Disease by Single Cell Omics

Presented by Professor Joachim Schultze, Professor for Genomics & Immunoregularion at the Life and Medical Sciences (LIMES)-Intitute and Founding Director of the PRECISE Platform for Single Cell Genomics and Epigenomics at the German Centre for Neurodegenerative Diseases and the University of Bonn. 

Myeloid cells including dendritic cells, monocytes, macrophages and granulocytes play important roles in tissue homeostasis and their functional deviation is a major contributor to most if not all major diseases our aging societies are currently facing. Classical omics approaches on bulk samples have recently established that the functional heterogeneity of myeloid cells in context of different tissue and organ locations is associated with different epigenetic and transcriptional programming. Furthermore, any deviation from tissue or organ homeostasis is reflected in
epigenetic and transcriptional changes in myeloid cells. In fact, these cells are capable of rapidly inducing input-specific transcriptional programs illustrating their enormous plasticity. Single cell resolution analysis now allows us to understand whether such changes are uniform within a myeloid cell compartment or whether
individual cells of the myeloid compartment can fine-tune their responses even further.

I will present some of our single cell omics (SCO) data derived from patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease as an example for how chronic inflammatory diseases shape the myeloid cell compartment. Furthermore, I will illustrate new SCO technologies allowing for a more sophisticated fine mapping of the myeloid cell compartment under homeostatic conditions, and lastly, I will give an example of how we can introduce changes over time into SCO analyses. Overall, the resolution, SCO techniques provide us, will have significant changes on our definitions and understanding of major diseases and thereby will shape novel diagnostic and therapeutic options.

Details

11 November 2019
12:00pm 
Room 2007