Where single cell sequencing revolutionized our understanding of tissues by building cellular “parts-lists,” spatial transcriptomics and proteomics stand to reveal how these parts fit and function together as one system. We use these tools to build comprehensive atlases of tissues to identify how disease perturbations induce and perturb cell interactions. Two overarching areas are:
Identifying the cell-to-cell interactions during brain development
Brain development consists of an integrated dance of cell type differentiation, migration, and subsequent connection pruning. Psychiatric diseases such as autism spectrum disorder and Schizophrenia perturb this process, but the mechanisms involved are still poorly understood. We thus aim to generate unbiased reference maps of the cell type composition over developmental stages of the mouse brain. We use these data to identify interactions critical for normal brain development, and how these interactions may be disrupted in mice with perturbed psychiatric risk genes.
Common cellular interactions across immune disease and cancer
We generate atlases in both human tumors and in biopsies from immune diseases from multiple tissues at various progression stages and treatment conditions. Taking studies individually, this data helps reveal the cellular interactions underlying immunotherapy response or the scar formation. We aim to leverage our central position across multiple studies to identify cellular interactions that are shared across tissues (i.e. lung and gut) or across injuries (i.e. tumor formation and inflammation).