Alec Pankow

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New preprint alert: gene regulatory network modeling of human airway epithelial response to IFN-I

A couple weeks late, but wanted to boost new preprint from the Miraldi, Scull and Rosenberg labs, as it is now available on bioRxiv¹. Big congrats to Anthony and the rest of the study team!

While we know quite a bit about IFN-I signaling in the context of continuous cell lines, we know comparatively less about IFN signaling in the cell types that potentially matter most: the airway epithelial cells which constitute the major targets of respiratory virus infection. Using single cell multi-omics (including 5’ scRNA-Seq and snATAC-Seq) we find there is a core set of IFNb-responsive genes (or IRGs) across airway cell type. However, somewhat surprisingly, we find that the majority of IRGs actually are cell type-associated! We weren’t anticipating this, as the IFN response is typically thought of as monolithic across cell types.