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A Tissue Atlas of Human B-Cell Receptor Population Diversity and Type
Start Date: 2/8/2017Start Time: 4:00 PM
End Date: 2/8/2017End Time: 5:30 PM

Event Description
BIOMED Seminar

Title:
A Tissue Atlas of Human B-Cell Receptor Population Diversity and Type

Speaker:
Uri Hershberg, PhD
Associate Professor
School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems
Drexel University

Abstract:
The function of the immune system cannot be reduced to the action of a single immune cell, rather it is the result of a cooperative interaction of multiple immune cells, each with its own context of interaction and environmental feedback and each with a repertoire of antibodies that have different binding capabilities. For instance, while immune receptors with some level of affinity to one's self are often observed, only some individuals suffer from autoimmunity.

A key element in the comparison of the behavior of immune cells and repertoires is the definition of individual clonotypes (sets of cells that are derived from a common progenitor cell with a common B-cell receptor, or BCR). Clonotypes comprise the basic building blocks of repertoires and their response.

In the System Immunology Lab, we develop and validate computational tools to analyze, characterize, and compare immune repertoires from the single cell level, aggregated through the level of the clonotype to the level of the whole repertoire, under different contexts. Recently, working in close collaboration with the Luning-Prak lab from the University of Pennsylvania, we have used these methods to analyze in depth the repertoires of 6 individual organ donors in 8 different tissues, from one of which we analyzed over 50 samples per tissue and identified ~50 million unique sequences and ~1,000,000 different clonotypes.

Due to this extreme depth of sequencing and our exact assessment of sampling sufficiency and levels of overlap, we could determine that the human immune repertoire is divided into two nearly orthogonal networks. These networks–one in the gut and the other in the blood/lung/spleen–show different levels of mixing internally amongst themselves and do not mix between each other. These findings, currently under review in Nature Biotechnology, have great implications regarding how we monitor and treat diseases in the different organs and are a first step in the science of tissue specific immune manipulation.

Biosketch
Uri Hershberg, PhD, is an Associate Professor at the Drexel University School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems and in the Department of Immunology and Microbiology at the Drexel University College of Medicine. He has a wide background in biology and computational methods. Dr. Hershberg was previously a Post Doc with Professor Mark Shlomchik, and then Associate Research Scientist with Professor Steven Kleinstein at the Yale School of Medicine. At Yale, he used computational tools to study the anti-viral response in dendritic cells and the dynamics of the B-cell repertoire in healthy and pathological immune responses.

Dr. Hershberg was educated at the Hebrew University, where he received a PhD in Computational Biology at the Interdisciplinary Center for Neuronal Computation under the supervision of Professor Irun Cohen of the Department of Immunology at the Weizmann Institute and Professor Sorin Solomon of the Rakah Theoretical Physics Institute at the Hebrew University. His PhD titled "The Emergence of Meaning in Biological Systems" dealt with the ability of the T-cell repertoire in the immune system to defend from pathogens and maintain its diversity without attacking the body.

Dr. Hershberg has published over 30 papers on topics related to B-cell, T-cell, and dendritic cell immunity, as well as the defining complex system criteria of cognitive perceptual systems, using the immune system as an example. He is on the editorial board of several publications and on the organizing committee of the International Conference on Artificial Immune Systems (ICARIS).
Uri Hershberg
Location:
Papadakis Integrated Sciences Building (PISB), Room 120, located on the northeast corner of 33rd and Chestnut Streets.
Audience:
  • Undergraduate Students
  • Graduate Students
  • Faculty
  • Staff

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