on November 21, 2019
To analyse the complex dynamics of immune cells in response to an insult, an interdisciplinary effort is required. In a paper published this week in the journal Frontiers in Immunology, the group of Santiago González at the IRB Bellinzona has characterized in vivo the dynamic behavior of neutrophils in the popliteal lymph node after influenza vaccination. To achieve this, they have employed an image-based systems biology approach, which detects the motility patterns of neutrophils and associates them to distinct actions. This approach combined different imaging methodologies, molecular techniques, and pattern recognition methods, which allow them to identify and characterize distinct behaviors of neutrophils in response to influenza vaccination.
This method will be very useful to understand the dynamic behavior of immune cells, and it has been currently applied to the characterization of immune cell dynamics in different experimental conditions such as immunotherapies or respiratory diseases.
This work is part of a large project aiming at generating new tools based on computational methods to extract knowledge from imaging data. To this end, an interdisciplinary research team from the IRB and from the Institute of Computational Science (ICS), led by Santiago González and Rolf Krause, is developing innovative tools that will help to understand the complexity of the immune response using a state-of–the-art imaging database.
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| Neutrophil recruitment in the draining lymph node after influenza vaccination |
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| The development of new computational methods allows the visualization and better analysis of cell immune cell activities |
This work was possible thanks to funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation and SystemsX.ch, the Swiss initiative in Systems Biology.
Article
Characterization of the Dynamic Behavior of Neutrophils Following Influenza Vaccination
Diego Ulisse Pizzagalli1, Irene Latino, Alain Pulfer, Miguel Palomino-Segura, Tommaso Virgilio, Yagmur Farsakoglu, Rolf Krause, and Santiago F. Gonzalez
Front. Immunol., doi: 10.3389/fimmu.2019.02621
