Studying tissue ageing by single cell genomics

Speaker:

Aki Minoda, Ph.D., Team Leader, Laboratory for Cellular Epigenomics, RIKEN Center for Integrative Medical Sciences

Title:

Studying tissue ageing by single cell genomics

Zoom URL: https://oist.zoom.us/j/95847650489?pwd=UzFpdGJONzI3QVRmQnRQdWZPYm1rUT09

Abstract:

The lung plays an important line of defense against pathogens that can infiltrate the body during respiration. Chronic inflammation of the lung could lead to impaired physiological functions and vulnerability to diseases. In the first part of my talk, I will describe our efforts to describe how the type 2 innate immune response is affected with age, which is understudied in comparison to other immune responses owing to its fairly recent discovery. I will present our findings upon activating the type 2 innate immune response in old mice and carrying out single cell RNA-seq.

Understanding the molecular mechanisms of ageing has conventionally focused on specific cell types, however, it is important to understand how tissues age as a whole and how the communication between cells within the tissue may be changing. Furthermore, the effect of the microbiome on the process of ageing is not very well known. In the second half of the talk, I will introduce our current efforts on taking a non-targeted and comprehensive approach of studying how cells age with and without the presence of the microbiome in the context of whole tissues. I will present our current progress on analysing single cell 5’ RNA-seq and single cell ATAC-seq from multiple tissues from both SPF (specific pathogen-free) and germ-free mice.