Welcome to the King lab!
Immune dynamics: The goal of our lab is to understand the cellular and molecular regulators of immunity in barrier tissues. We study the dynamics of the host response to infection - how cells respond to changes in their environment, including soluble mediators, cellular interactions, and changes in antigen, nutrient and oxygen availability. These cues are integrated to promote the generation of both transient and stable fates. A better understanding of this process is essential in order to improve vaccine design, particularly as different strategies may be needed for prophylactic, post-exposure or therapeutic vaccines.
Systems Immunology: There has been a recent explosion of single cell techniques for investigating transcriptional responses at an unbiased single cell level as well as multiplexed microscopy approaches to identify and quantify cellular spatial relationships. In addition, we have established a novel approach to address the differentiation and plasticity of immune cells (e.g. CD4 T cells as in figure above) and their progeny ex vivo, using time-lapse microscopy. By applying these single cell technologies we aim to advance our understanding of adaptive immunity, using a macro-to-micro approach: we start from the whole organ, examine specific immune cell subsets, and then proceed to molecular determinants of individual cell fates and function.