Alessandro Greco

Short description of my project:

The aim of my project is to understand the emergence of lymphocytes and lymphoid progenitors from hematopoietic stem cells, how this process is affected by challenges to the immune system, such as multimicrobial sepsis or irradiation and how tranformation to T cell leukemia can set it. To this end, I analyse the RNA of hematopoietic stem cells and progenitors at  single cell resolution and at different timepoints, and reveal how the hematopoietic branching is affected over time.

In adult mammals, T lymphocytes, as well as other cells of the immune system, develop from hematopoietic stem cells in the bone marrow. Cell differentiation is thought to proceed through intermediate steps in which multilineage potential becomes gradually restricted up to the point of final commitment to a differentiated cell type. However, the mechanisms that regulate the cell fluxes along hematopoietic lineage pathways in steady state and in response to challenges remain poorly understood. Together with the group of Hans-Reimer Rodewald, we are studying how the hematopoietic system responds to systematic infections such as multimicrobial sepsis. This severe challenge causes a fast and strong decrease in the numbers of T and B lymphocytes as well as granulocytes and other immune cells.