Reconstructing the developing blood and immune system through single cell genomics
Throughout postnatal life, haematopoiesis in the bone marrow (BM) maintains blood and immune cell production. Haematopoiesis first emerges in human BM at 12 post conception weeks while fetal liver (FL) haematopoiesis is still expanding. Yet, almost nothing is known about how fetal BM evolves to meet the highly specialised needs of the fetus and newborn infant. This talk will summarize our work on the development of fetal BM using single cell RNA-sequencing. We find that fetal BM promotes rapid and extensive diversification of myeloid cells and expansion of B-lymphocytes. We identify transcriptional differences that underlie tissue-specific identity and cellular diversification in fetal BM and FL. Finally, we reveal selective disruption of B-lymphocyte, erythroid and myeloid development due to cell intrinsic differentiation bias as well as extrinsic regulation through an altered microenvironment in the fetal BM from constitutional chromosome anomaly Down syndrome.
Laura Jardine is an Academic Clinical Lecturer in Haematology at Newcastle University.
She co-leads work on the human fetal bone marrow as part of the Human Cell Atlas Development strand. Her work takes place in the Haniffa Lab, headed by Professor Muzz Haniffa. She is clinically active, working predominantly in bone marrow transplantation.
Her training was in Biological Sciences (AB, Harvard, 2004), Medicine (MBBChir, Cambridge, 2008) and Immunology (PhD, Newcastle, 2016).
She spends her spare time running and looking after her two children.