PME Special Seminar - Sander van Kasteren

Immunology in Space and Time - New Chemical Methods to Study Immune System Kinetics at the Single Cell and Molecule Level

Dr. Sander Izaäk van Kasteren, Associate professor, Leiden University, The Netherlands

Understanding how phenotypic diversity of immune cells correlates to immune function is essential for understanding immune responses. Two problems associated with this are that high-dimensional analyses of immune cells keep highlighting that the diversity within sets of immune cells is enormous. And that the cells of the immune system change over time influenced by external factors. In this talk, I will present two new technologies we are developing to help make sense of this. The first of is a new set of reagents that we can use to correlate the uptake of nutrients by immune cells to their phenotype. We can quantify the uptake (and the rate of uptake) of fatty acids, LDL-particles and glutamine by immune cells in vivo at the single cell level using click-chemistry based approaches. We can correlate this data to their phenotype and integrate this data in complex flow panels and other -omics approaches. In the second topic, I will zoom in even further and talk about our new method to quantify the single molecule binding kinetics of carbohydrates to immune lectins. By measuring the on and off rates of binding of glycopeptide vaccines on livin cells and correlating this to the downstream immunology of these vaccines, we can elucidate the role these enigmatic receptors play in antigen processing.

Zoom: https://uchicago.zoom.us/j/91787915456?pwd=UmNlSExUeWR2UWE2SlI2emtaQVgxdz09