About his PhD project

Peyer’s patches are the main inductive sites of intestinal immunity, which is crucial for host defense against pathogens but also for regulation of the microbiota and tolerance to food proteins. Both right positioning and activation of specific immune cells are critical for the drastic change of transcriptional programs that lead to the initiation of the intestinal immune response. However, the links between immune cell location, their migration and interaction with neighboring cells , activation, transcriptional changes, and the immune response itself remain poorly characterized. Here, we will combine spatial transcriptomics, high resolution fluorescent imaging, bioinformatic analysis and cross-modal machine learning methods to decipher the microenvironmental circuits involved in Peyer’s patch immune response initiation in different conditions of stimulation. It will allow to understand how these different cellular mechanisms are orchestrated together to produce an appropriate immune response to detected threats.