Event Date: 29 Jun 2015 08:00 AM - 29 Jun 2015 09:00 AM

Event Venue: Enterprise Wing, Level 5, Perseverance Rooms 1/2

BioSyM Seminar Series

Microfluidic-assisted isolation of club cells with notable traces of stemness from the mouse lung

By Dr Yin Lu (SMART-BioSyM)

Seminar Abstract
Club cells are non-ciliated bronchiolar epithelial cells that line up in the interior wall of bronchioles. Previous studies have reported the function of club cells in protecting bronchiole lining, detoxifying harmful substances getting into the airway through inhalation, and repairing bronchiolar injury by renewing itself and differentiating into ciliated cells. More recent studies have demonstrated in vivo that in the case of severe lung injury, club cells are able to differentiate into alveolar epithelial cells and P63-expressing cells to repair the damaged alveoli and regenerate new bronchioles in damaged lung parenchyma. The emerging understanding of club as multi-potent progenitor/stem cell has shed light on the potential stem cell therapy approaches in clinical management of severe lung tissue damage, and this requires isolation of high potency club cells. In this study, we established a novel method for the isolation of multi-potent club cell from mouse lung using a combination of inertial microfluidics and flow cytometry sorting. Our method has significantly improved the efficiency and purity of club cell isolation, and was able to enrich thepopulation of club cell with stronger colony forming capacity.
 

Speaker’s Biography
Dr. Lu is currently a postdoctoral associate in BioSystems and Micromechanics Inter-Disciplinary Research Group of Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART). He received his Ph.D. in Computational Systems Biology, from Singapore-MIT Alliance Programme, National University of Singapore. He was a research fellow and thenpostdoctoral associate in Infectious Disease Inter-Disciplinary Research Group of SMART from 2010 to 2012, when he used imaging-based tissue informatics approach to explore the cellular mechanism of lung tissue repair following influenza infection in mouse models. His current research focuses on the development and application of inertial microfluidics in various stem cell and cancer studies, including circulation tumour cell, tumour stem cell, adult lung stem cell, cartilage and spinal chondrocytes, etc.