Congratulations to Rebecca Ihrie and Jonathan Irish! Baby Julian Robert Irish arrived on December 5, 2014!
HPI Division Meeting: December - no meeting, we will continue with chalk-talk on January 27th - Lan Wu, M.D.
2nd Friday Happy Hour: 12/12/14 at MCN A5305, 4:00pm - Hosted by the Oscar Gomez and John Williams labs.
Publications: A total of 19 publications from HPI faculty have been posted on Pubmed in the month of November. The listings and links to all publications follow below.
A time-saving tip: Booking a room for your next meeting can become super-easy. This is how you do it:
(1) See what is scheduled in PMI conference rooms as follows: In Outlook, click on the “folder list”(Ctrl+6), drill down to the Public folders /All Public Folders/Medical Center/Pathology
(2) Send an email or call one of the following people:
18. The Cancer Genomics Resource List 2014.Zutter MM, Bloom KJ, Cheng L, Hagemann IS, Kaufman JH, Krasinskas AM, Lazar AJ, Leonard DG, Lindeman NI, Moyer AM, Nikiforova MN, Nowak JA, Pfeifer JD, Sepulveda AR, Willis JE, Yohe SL. Arch Pathol Lab Med. 2014 Dec 1. [Epub ahead of print]
This month's featured publication comes from one of our junior faculty members, Dr. Jonathan Irish and it highlights how a combination of high-tech single-cell profiling approaches and appropriate analysis tools have induced a surge in (or rather created) the field of "systems immunology".
For example, approaches such as mass cytometry, (which you can think of as a high octane version of regular flow cytometry), can detect over 34 markers within a sampled cell pool, owing to the ingenious modification in which fluorochrome tags are replaced by a series of rare earth elements (e.g., lanthanides), which are then attached to antibodies through metal-chelator coupling reagents. Labeled cells then flow through the instrument, become vaporized at 5500 K, and the released tags are identified and quantified by time-of-flight mass spectrometry. In addition to the increased number of "tags" that can be used, mass cytometry also eliminates the issue of fluorescence compensation, which is a problem commonly observed when fluorophores have overlapping emission spectra.
However, this approach would not be as powerful if there were no developed software geared towards analyzing the obtained data, clustering the information and making sense of the raw outputs.
Here Dr. Irish demonstrates the power of combining mass cytometry with computational tools that help visualize the obtained high-dimensional data, by briefly describing the work of Becher and colleagues (Nature Immunol. 2014 (15), 1181-89), who used mass cytometry and associated software to create a modern reference map of the healthy mouse myeloid system across eight tissues!
This is an impressive achievement that was made possible by inter-disciplinary approaches that led to the co-development of assay and analysis tools. What is more fantastic is that Dr. Irish is among the leaders of this newly emerging field and that mass cytometry is available through Vanderbilt's flow cytometry shared resource.
A call for Student/Post-doc Participation
Thank you to every lab that contributed images for the hallway beautification. The goal is to create a pleasing, welcoming environment, highlighting our research to visitors and interview candidates alike.
We are now entering a second phase for that project. We would like our students and trainees to participate as well, submitting images, crystal structures, favorite results/gels etc for incorporation into collated art projects that we can then display.
Please submit your favorite research art to helen.chomicki@vanderbilt.edu by January 20, 2015. More details will follow in the January myHPI contingent on participation.
What are your thoughts? Feel free to muse by sending us an email (maria.hadjifrangiskou@vanderbilt.edu, helen.chomicki@vanderbilt.edu)