Single-Cell Approaches to Decipher Central Nervous System Trauma

Tissue damage induces inflammation as a way to signal the need for correction and repair. In many cases, this involves the clearing of dead, dying, or damaged cells. This project will build single-cell biology tools to understand specific cell types that engulf dying cells and debris during injury to the central nervous system. Using these tools, the team will determine differences in the engulfment and cell clearance of damaged cells after neural injury and how they correlate to either cell regeneration or degeneration. The tools will be useful to understand this general process in other organs and tissues after injury.