Tracking how blood stem cells remember signals across the lifespan

Alejo Rodríguez-Fraticelli

Fundació Institut de Recerca Biomèdica (IRB Barcelona), Spain

Blood and immune systems change with age, inflammation and disease. Blood-forming stem cells strongly influence these changes by responding to signals from their environment and retaining a memory of past exposures. However, scientists lack effective tools to follow how individual stem cells process signals over time and shape their future behaviour. This project aims to build a detailed framework to address this gap.

The project will track thousands of individual stem cells, observe their responses to different signals and examine how these responses change with age. Then, they will combine tracking data with computational modelling to compare immediate and long-term responses in young and aged cells and create more realistic virtual representations of stem-cell behaviour. The team brings together expertise in stem cell biology, immunology, ageing, genome-scale experiments and data science.

The findings could help predict how stem cells behave during inflammation, regeneration and ageing, and develop strategies to adjust these responses. More broadly, the project would help understand immune decline and blood diseases and inform the development of future cell-based therapies.

Cartograms of hematopoietic responses to extrinsic perturbations

€499,712.60