Feeling so grateful to be part of this amazing team! Honored to work with brilliant colleagues and mentors who make research both exciting and inspiring 🌟

💫Fantastic experience diving into CRISPR technology, hearing inspiring clinical stories, and connecting with incredible people! It was also a refreshing getaway from NYC — great meals, beautiful views🌄, and even better company. Truly an inspiring experience.

In this project, I’m using single-cell pooled CRISPR 🧬screening in glioblastoma 🧠to look for new ways to overcome immune evasion. It’s very different from my work on multimodal immune profiling in human GVHD, but both share the same theme: exploring how T cells interact in disease.

Had the great opportunity to attend and present my project in @jlmcfalinefigueroa.bsky.social lab, leveraging the tools developed in the @elhamazizi.bsky.social lab in the Genome Engineering: CRISPR Frontiers meeting at the @cshlnews.bsky.social Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory last week.

Shoutout to co-first authors Ajna Uzuni and Ximi Wang, and to Michael Pressler, the papers would not be the same withou you all. Thanks also to the McFaline-Figueroa Lab for their support. Check out our preprint for a deeper dive into the findings!

12/🧬 Huge thanks to everyone involved in this project—your contributions were invaluable in uncovering key biological insights. I'm especially grateful to my mentor @elhamazizi.bsky.social for her guidance, and to my collaborator Dr. Ran Reshef at CUIMC.

11/ 🧬
📖 Full paper: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
🛠 Tools: DecompTCR, StarfyshHD, and DecipherTCR now available on GitHub.
🔬 Built for GVHD, applicable to cancer, IBD, and other immune diseases.

Would love to hear from others working on T cell dynamics or GVHD—what are you seeing?

10/ 🧬
🧩 Implication:
The expansion and phenotypic shift of cytotoxic T cells in severe GVHD may offer a potential target for new therapies.

This study also offers a transformative paradigm for studying complex immune responses in human using integrated temporal and spatial single-cell approaches.

9/ 🧬
💥 Bonus: We also see Tregs and unconventional T cells reprogrammed into pro-inflammatory states. It’s immune dysregulation across multiple fronts.

8/🧬
🌍 We used the first, to our knowledge, Visium HD dataset from human gut tissue in GVHD—2µm resolution—to show that CD8⁺ effector T cells cluster near intestinal stem cells in Severe GVHD and are enriched in crypt loss region, suggesting these effector cells drive tissue damage.

7/🧬
🧠 Key finding:
👀 Here’s the Decipher map showing clonal trajectories across tissue compartments. We discovered that cytototix CD8⁺ T cell clones are clonally expanded, change state as they move between gut layers, and acquire resident memory (Hobit⁺ Trm) phenotypes.

6/🧬
📈 DecompTCR uncovers which clones persist, expand, and associate with GVHD severity.

5/ 🧬
🧪 We developed StarfyshHD, a spatial transcriptomics analysis tool tailored for Visium HD data to integrate multiple samples, map fine-grained cell states, and identify spatial hubs (unique composition of cell types).

4/🧬
🧭 We introduced DecipherTCR, a tool to trace how T cell clones change phenotype across tissue compartments. #Decipher

3/🧬 We built #DecompTCR, a new model to resolve T cell clonal dynamics over time.

2/🧬
🎯 Why it matters:
GVHD is a leading cause of mortality post-transplant. We show that its pathology is driven not just by T cell infiltration, but by clonal expansion and dynamic phenotypic shifts in the gut.

1/🧬 This is the first 🧭🧬 spatiotemporal single-cell atlas of human GVHD.
We combined 🧪 Mixed Lymphocyte Reaction, 🧬 TCR tracking, 🔬 single-cell RNA-seq, and 🗺️ spatial transcriptomics to map how donor T cells evolve 🔁, move 🧗‍♂️, and damage tissue 💥 after transplant.

I just presented my work at the @keystonesymposia.bsky.social Single Cell Biology-where we tracked how human T cells evolve across time and space during #GVHD. And it changes everything.
💡 It’s not just infiltration—T cells adapt and shift phenotype as they migrate through tissue.
bioarxiv link 👇

#ASH2024 Just finished presenting in the largest room ever! 🎉 So grateful for my amazing team and mentors @elhamazizi.bsky.social and ReshefLab for their support in sharing our work on immune profiling in GVHD. Wonderful moment to remember! #GVHD