Hayday lab

Immunosurveillance Laboratory

 Big science

Gut Gamma Delta T cells detected by their expression of TCR delta chain RNA (red) line the human colonic epithelium (DAPI; blue) where they are well-placed to perform frontline immune surveillance.

Our laboratory at King's College London won a Wellcome Trust Strategic Award to collaborate and co-ordinate with the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute (WTSI) an Immunology and Infection Immunophenotyping (3i) consortium to comprehensively immunophenotype more than 800 gene knockout mouse strains to be generated at WTSI over five years. The 3i consortium should provide substantial new insight into genes regulating development, function and pathology within the immune system, including lymphoid stress-surveillance.

In parallel, our laboratory at King's College London has established the capability to undertake routine immune-monitoring of humans in response to vaccination; treatment, such as chemotherapy; and in special circumstances, such as premature birth. This is a direct route to identifying how molecules and pathways identified in model systems 'play out' in humans from birth to old age.

Additionally and importantly, this study and 3i jointly fuel new investigations of how to analyse and disseminate huge diverse data sets, with the likely development of fundamentally different ways to present, for instance, flow cytometry data.