A consortium of researchers coordinated by several HMS investigators has announced the start of the Immunology Genome Project. The project, described in the October 2008 issue of Nature Immunology, teams immunology labs, computational biologists, and visualization specialists from multiple institutions in an effort to draw a roadmap of the genetic pathways that define the way immune cells function.
The ImmGen project aims to capture gene expression profiles of every type and subtype of immune cell in the mouse—over 200 cell types in all—through developmental stages and under various conditions of immune challenge. “This project is of an unprecedented scale. Only for the immune system do researchers have the tools and background for such a fine-grained dissection of cell populations,” said Christophe Benoist, HMS professor of medicine at Joslin Diabetes Center and an ImmGen principal investigator.
Because each participating lab has expertise in a different cell lineage, the preparatory work has been challenging. In an early test, 10 different ImmGen labs across the country followed similar operating procedures to isolate the same cell type, but still ended up with variances in their results. Though many of these discrepancies have been worked out, “we’re still fine-tuning the process,” said Shannon Turley, HMS assistant professor of pathology at Dana–Farber Cancer Institute and one of the ImmGen investigators. “This is a pretty transformative process,” she said, “because the standards settled on will allow many labs to produce comparable data.”
With modern tools for generating such results, “data itself is no longer a limiting factor; the challenge is in how to make it comprehensible to the human mind, to convert data into insight,” said Benoist. The ImmGen data is posted after verification at the publicly accessible website www.immgen.org, which explores novel data visualization approaches.
As the genetic snapshots become available, ImmGen cell biologists and computational biologists will analyze and interpret the data. In addition to opening up communications between these two groups, said Amy Wagers, HMS assistant professor of pathology at Joslin, professor of stem cell and regenerative biology at Harvard University, and an ImmGen investigator, this collaboration “will help us get the most out of the data that we can.”
The resulting roadmap will include the profiling data, which will be valuable for testing existing hypotheses about immune cell function and development, plus genetic networks and signatures, and a host of new hypotheses.
Students may contact Christophe Benoist or Diane Mathis at cbdm@joslin.harvard.edu for more information.
Conflict Disclosure: The authors report no conflicts of interest.
Funding Sources: ImmGen is supported by the National Institutes of Health. The companies eBiosciences, Affymetrix, and Expression Analysis are contributing reagents and materials.
