The Immune System
What surprised me the most out of all of the things we learned in this internship is learning about the immune system. To me it is certainly the most impressive system in our body and it is an evolutionary masterpiece. The different cells and organs that form it almost seem like independent beings working together to (for the most part) keep you healthy. It's a bit morbid but the funniest part to me is the neutrophils. It may be personifying them a bit but they are so obsessed with killing any bacteria they can find (through phagocytosis) that they present a real danger to your own cells around the area of infection, necessitating them to undergo apoptosis a few days after activation. Those neutrophils are part of the innate immune system however and to me the most impressive part is the adaptive immune system. Shortly after infection your dendritic cells will begin covering themselves in the antigens of whatever infected you and travel into your lymph nodes. Once there they begin rubbing up against every t-cell they can find. Most ignore the dendritic cell but within 1-2 hours it finds a t-cell that recognizes the antigen. This T-cell is now activated and it begins clonal expansion. Some of the newly formed activated T-cells travel to the site of infection and begin helping fight whatever pathogen formed the antigen that activated them. Another group begins activating your B-cells to produce antibodies. One of the ways that immunotherapy is given is by modifying this system of antibody production to target cancer cells. All in all your immune system is one of the most fascinating parts of your body and while it isn’t perfect it is simply incredible that something so advanced evolved naturally.
New computational method opens window into immune cell behavior
CoNGA is a new computational method of analyzing the function of the TCR receptor and its role on the genomic expression of T-cells and thereby their function. While a single researcher may be able to examine a single cell and determine links between TCR and the cell’s function, CoNGA is able to look at enormous datasets containing data from millions of cells to help the researchers understand it. Different T-cells use TCR for different things, some identify cells that need to be killed off, while some activate B-cells to produce antibodies. The ability to look at TCR and determine the T-cells function would constitute a breakthrough in the understanding of the immune system. That is the eventual goal of the CoNGA method. CoNGA works by comparing two datasets, one grouping T-cells by what genes they have activated, and one grouping T-cells by their TCR sequence. It then finds the link between those two datasets helping researchers understand the correlation. Once they can perfect this system they hope to apply CoNGA in a similar way to B-cells to similarly understand their functions.