Chemistry Colloquium: Dr. Oni Basu

The Department of Chemistry in the College of Arts and Sciences is pleased to welcome Dr. Oni Basu, an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of Chicago.

Title: Single Cell Experiments at the Epithelial Barrier: Inflammatory Bowel Disease and Host-Microbiome Interactions

Abstract:

The basic units of biological structure and function are cells, which exhibit wide variation in regard to both type and state. We assess such variation by simultaneously profiling the transcriptomes of thousands of single cells or their nuclei, using high-throughput emulsion microfluidics and DNA barcodes. As part of the global Human Cell Atlas initiative, we are performing matched single-cell/nucleus gene expression and chromatin accessibility assays on surgical tissues and endoscopic biopsies to generate cellular, molecular and functional maps of the human gut in the context of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). These studies allow us to examine gene expression patterns and their regulatory elements in each cell type, and connect our single cell profiling results with known disease loci, genes and risk variants identified by previous genome wide association studies. The data and knowledge gained from our single-cell studies on IBD also allow us to model complex patient-specific disease features in in vitro organoid with the aim to stratify disease features and tailor patient treatments.  We are also developing new microfluidic and genomic tools to study phenotypic responses of cells to different environmental stimuli, study host-microbiome interactions and perform on-chip microbial ‘omics.