16 Similarly, a high-bandwidth low-cost deep sequencing approach has recently been described for sequencing human leukocyte antigen (HLA) regions.17 The size, diversity, and affinity of this repertoire is expected to be closely linked with immune response. Hence, exploring this diversity and its clinical implications in an individual or a population

is of high importance. Cell Type-Specific and Single Cell Gene Expression Assays Much of our knowledge in immunology comes from bulk measurements of many cells together. Due to problems of averaging Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical and noise, the behavior of cells as inferred from average measurements often drowns cell-to-cell differences and may not reflect the behavior of any single cell.18 Beyond measuring a select few biological species across many single cells and different cell types (e.g.

in flow or mass-based cytometry), measurement of many biological species (e.g. whole genome gene expression) has been dictated by cost limitations, technological hurdles, and the Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical difficulty of analyzing en masse single cell data. Hence, it is often the case that multiple cell types are Gemcitabine purchase analyzed as a single tissue, such as happens for example when gene expression is analyzed in bulk from whole Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical blood, and the resulting analysis to a large degree describes the heterogeneity of the tissue, rather than the underlying biological changes in condition that Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical are of interest. Recent methodological and technological innovations now elevate some of these difficulties and enable the in-depth exploration of several biological species in many cell types or single cells. These include computational methodologies to infer cell type-specific information from heterogeneous tissue data,19,20 microfluidic devices used to measure and image cells run in multiplex (across multiple

cells and genes),21,22 and, emerging now, single cell whole genome measures.23,24 These methodologies and technological innovations Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical have enabled the measurement of single cell cytokine secretion25 and cell counting from minute samples,26,27 to name but a few. The miniaturization of these devices and their relative low cost and transportability are promising tuclazepam for the future development of microfluidics-based diagnostics. The sensitivity of cell type-specific measures performed through these techniques often offers orders of magnitude higher resolution than that obtained by analyzing heterogeneous measures of tissue and cells and reveal novel biological phenomena masked by cell-to-cell or cell type-to-cell type variation. INTEGRATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE IMMUNE SYSTEM IN A ONE-STOP SHOP In a highly interconnected system such as immunity, it would be expected that changes in one component of the immune “network” will affect other connected components.