An Open Access Spatiotemporal Atlas of Childhood Intestinal Development

Single-cell technologies have revolutionized our understanding of human tissue biology in health and disease. By defining cellular heterogeneity, differentiation, and cross-talk, these techniques are capable of highlighting the molecular determinants governing development and homeostasis in health and the mechanisms underpinning cellular remodeling in disease. This team previously provided open access atlases of the human colon in health and inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), and a resource documenting how the human fetal intestine develops. These resources highlighted an urgent need to undertake studies to better understand how a healthy immune system develops in symbiosis with the intestinal microbiota, and provide a framework to understand both neonatal, childhood, and adult intestinal diseases.

This project will not only provide a state-of-the art tissue and data resource, but develop a novel computational framework using machine learning models for prediction of transcriptomic features from histology. This will allow quantification of micro-domains across large numbers of tissue sections in order to assess how micro-domain structure and co-localization changes in settings such as development and disease.