ITIM - Identification of Phenotypic Differences in Inflammatory and Regulatory T Cell Popula-tions in Immunodeficient Recipient Mice

Project duration: 2020-2021

Project coordination:

Dr. Richard Ottermanns (ottermanns@bio5.rwth-aachen.de)

 

Description of the Project:
 
The gut is the biggest frontier of the body with the outside world. As such, it hosts a high number of immune cells ready to fight incoming pathogens. The immune system has to decide continuously if it will mount an inflammatory or a tolerogenic response towards a given antigen. These decisions reside in part on T cells, which differentiate towards different fates upon antigen encounter. Basically, the aim is to see how the environment modulates the behaviour of regulatory cells, making them “active” or “inactive”. The specific data to be analysed in this project involves the transfer of one inflammatory and two regulatory T cell populations into immunodeficient recipient mice. Three different regulatory T cell populations are compared in the same recipient as well as the same regulatory population across different recipients at different time points to identify phenotypic differences. To analyse T cell behaviour multiparametric flow cytometry is used, which results in relatively big data sets that have to be analysed with specific statistical tools (e.g. from pattern recognition, machine learning and AI).

ITIM is an interdisciplinary cooperation between the Institute for Environmental Research and the Institute for Molecular Medicine (Uniklinik Aachen).