TCR diversity in health and in HIV

Before I forget, here's a record of the poster I presented recently at the Quantitative Immunology workshop in Les Houches (which I blogged about the first day of last week*).

In a move I was pretty pleased with, I hosted my poster on figshare, with an additional pdf of supplementary information. (I even included a QR code on the poster linking to both, which I thought pretty cunning, but this plan was sadly scuppered by a complete lack of wifi signal.)

You can access the poster here, and the supplementary information here.

The poster gives a gives a quick glance at some of my recent work where I've been using random barcodes to error-correct deep-sequenced TCR repertoires, a technique I'm applying to comparing healthy individuals to HIV patients, both before and after three months of antiretroviral therapy.

* For those interested in a larger overview of the conference, my supervisor Benny Chain wrote a longer piece at his blog Immunology with numbers

UCL Triple-Eye Symposium

I meant to write this post over the weekend, but unfortunately a dinner of all I could eat barbecue meant I spent most of the time sleeping and rubbing my stomach. Now I've recovered somewhat, I just thought I'd share a couple of highlights of Friday's symposium

It was the UCL Infection, Immunology & Inflammation Domain's third annual symposium, celebrating the work of this aggregation of UCL (and partner institution) academics' research.

There were a few highlights for me. The keynote speaker, Stephen Goff, gave an engaging account of his work into embryonic stem cell restriction of retroviral infection.

Another great talk came from one of our BiPR colleagues, Brenden Wren, who studies bacterial glycosylation, but moreover has developed a glyco-toolkit, allowing bacterial production of proteins-of-interest with desired sugar modifications.

However the best bit of the day was a bit more selfish, as two PhDs in our lab (myself and Lucy Bell) won first prize in our respective poster sessions, which was very warmly appreciated!

There had been a lot of interest in our TCR repertoire work throughout the poster sessions, particularly to a figure I'd presented of some of the difficulties inherent in deep-sequencing TCR repertoires. I think I might expand on this for a later blog post, so if that's interesting to you, watch this space.