In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of 

Doctor of Philosophy in Biology

in the 

School of Biological Sciences

Swetha Garimalla

will defend his dissertation

Integrative Immunotranscriptomics of Long-Lived Plasma Cells

Friday, November 2, 2018

2:00 PM

Molecular Sciences and Engineering, 1201A

Thesis Advisor:

Dr. Greg Gibson

School of Biological Sciences

Georgia Institute of Technology

Committee members: 

Dr. Soojin Yi

School of Biological Sciences

Georgia Institute of Technology

Dr. Peng Qui

School of Biological Sciences

Georgia Institute of Technology

Dr. Frances Eun-Hyung Lee

Department of Medicine

Emory University

Dr. Rabin Tirouvanziam

Pediatrics Department of Pediatric Infectious Diseases

Emory University

Summary

Long-lived plasma cells are a key component of serological memory encoded by the adaptive immune response. To date, prior studies of these cell types have largely assessed plasma cells as one homogenous population. The Lee Lab at Emory University provided strong evidence for the presence of subpopulations of plasma cells in the bone marrow and peripheral blood. In this work, I analyze six of these populations: pops 2, 3, and 5 in the peripheral blood and pops A, B, and D in the bone marrow sampled from live human donors.  Whole-transcriptome analysis of these six flow-sorted plasma cell populations is compared within and across tissue within this study.  Further, I present 4 possible models of development of these plasma cells based on the results. Finally, I performed a single-cell RNA sequencing analysis of the long-lived plasma cells (popD) and present evidence for the possibility of subpopulations of this cell type. This work describes many mechanisms of molecular development of long-lived plasma cells, some of which have been experimentally validated by Dr. Doan Nguyen as a result of these analyses, however, further experimental validation is required to validate all findings in this work.