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What we offer: Activities that build community and collaboration. (5/5)

What we offer: Consideration for our Endowed Scholars Program (large start-up package). (4/5) www.utsouthwestern.edu/education/no...

Endowed Scholars Program in Medical ScienceThe Endowed Scholars Program in Medical Science provides generous financial support to newly appointed tenure-track Assistant Professors at UT Southwestern.www.utsouthwestern.edu

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What we offer: A highly collaborative and supportive environment that enables innovative science. (2/5)

Many thanks to our co-authors—this was a huge team effort with some insane time points! And I can’t say enough about John Brooks: a fantastic scientist and an even better human. Very thankful for this crew!

Congrats to co-first authors Temi Oshinowo (Princeton MTSP student), Robert Maples (UTSW PhD student defending in June), and Mikal Woods Acevedo (former UTSW PhD student, current U Pittsburgh postdoc, and soon to start his own lab).

We hope that this dataset will be useful for those interested in intestinal immunity and circadian biology. Stay tuned for a user-friendly interactive tool from Gabby where you can pick a cell type and follow expression patterns over time.

Examining interactions of plasma cells over time suggests they may receive cues from other cells that are “on the clock”. Makes sense: Perhaps plasma cells deprioritize clock control in favor of mass antibody production (1000s of antibodies/second!) & instead rely on other cells for regulatory cues.

However, terminally differentiated antibody-producing plasma cells have minimal circadian gene expression and few oscillatory genes. Although these cells are “off the clock”, previous work suggests rhythmic production of IgA in the intestine. How?

Some immune cells are particularly “on the clock”: Th17 and innate lymphoid cells have high expression of circadian clock genes. Most immune cells have rhythmic gene expression.

Gene expression patterns suggest that antigen processing in dendritic cells may precede antigen recognition by T cells—temporal coordination of these processes makes sense energetically.

Populations of certain B cell subtypes, including transitional B cells and centrocytes, are extremely dynamic with large shifts over a six hour time frame. TRANSITIONAL B cells indeed.

As expected, there are a ton of naïve B cells (and T cells). The small intestine is a great site for immunological “education”. But what about changes over time?

First, Robert had to call cell types. Intestinal immune cells have quirks compared to other body sites, so he scoured the literature (165 papers over the last 45 yrs). It’s a crime that this work is a single sentence in the paper and one supplemental table.

Here’s what they found using their scRNA-seq data from >815,000 cells:

Then Gabby, a world-class bioinformatician/immunologist/urban farmer/MSTP student in Lora Hooper’s lab, worked her magic. Gabby is so good (& collaborative) that she has been a de facto bioinformatics resource for several labs on campus. Robert also used this opportunity to learn bioinformatics.

So Robert, an immunology aficionado/cat dad/sleep-optional PhD student, used flow cytometry & scRNA-seq to follow mouse intestinal immune cell dynamics at 4 timepoints across the day-night cycle. Chaitanya Dende & Tarun Srinivasan were super helpful with the insane workload and hardcore immunology.

Backstory: We previously found that mice orally infected with coxsackievirus B3 in the morning vs. night had 100-fold different viral titers. Stay tuned for that story—a fun collaboration with John Brooks’ lab at Princeton. But it made us wonder about immune cell dynamics in the intestine.

Great news, congrats Chris!

What we offer: Activities that build community and collaboration. (5/5)