Human intestinal T cell immune surveillance

The adaptive arm of immune system uses lymphocytes to generate antibody and memory responses to challenges throughout life. Three lineages of lymphocytes have co-evolved over the last 550 million years: B cells, ɑβ T cells and γδ T cells. Human γδ T cells remain poorly understood and their exact role in immunity is unclear. However, human γδ T cells are frequently implicated in protective microbial and tumour immunity. γδ T cells are distributed throughout the body and form an extensive immune surveillance network. Our group seeks to explore the role of this network in health and disease. Human γδ T cells are enriched at intestinal barrier sites, where microbial infection and chronic inflammation occur. The student will have access to paediatric intestinal biopsies on a weekly basis from Monash Children’s Hospital. The student will use state-of-the-art single cell TCR sequencing and RNAseq to investigate matched blood and tissue samples, allowing the identification of tissue resident γδ T cell populations. Understanding the properties of these tissue resident sentinels will allow the development of new γδ T-cell-based immunotherapeutics.