Immune cell doublets: Unveiling secrets with real-time imaging flow cytometry

Cell doublets are routinely detected in the analysis of human immune cells from blood and tissue preparations, yet they are commonly excluded from data acquisition and/or analysis, as they are believed to be technical artifacts resulting from ex vivo sample manipulation. However, this blanket exclusion ignores the fact that highly conserved biological mechanisms rely on direct cellular contact and that cell doublets may be windows into those processes. 

In this webinar, Julie Burel, PhD will share how their team has discovered that human blood-derived immune cell doublets exhibit imaging, molecular and cellular signatures consistent with known biological processes, and that their frequency and phenotype fluctuates during infection and vaccination. Thus, some cell doublets might reflect biologically meaningful interactions, making their study highly valuable. The paucity of research on cell doublets has been so far limited by the fact that they are largely ignored, but also because instrument or analytical tools are not designed for their study. 

Based on the example of T cell-monocyte complexes in human blood, Dr. Burel will:

1. Address the challenges of studying immune cell doublets and highlight innovative experimental and data analysis workflows to overcome these obstacles.

2. Summarize the current understanding of their immunobiology.

3. Demonstrate how the high-throughput imaging spectral cell sorter BD FACSDiscover™ S8 is revolutionizing the discovery of novel biological insights related to doublets.