This thread is for discussion of Michael Sikora's presentation at the Stanford Community Symposium 2018, focusing on the T cell work of the Mark Davis team. The talk starts at approximately 5:06:00
It's just the recorded live stream link, you have to sign in. Is it working for you? It seems ok for me. I'm not aware of any stand alone videos of the talks yet, but we can add them as they become available.
Oh, that's odd. I see the sign on for the symposium, which works for me when I click on it. I've got to knock off for the night, brain dead, I'll sort it out in the morning. If people click on the link the the symposium (first line of the first post in this thread), that will take them to the main thread that has links to the recorded livestream.
Hmm, I can't see the link there either. I would guess it's something to do with my computer settings at the moment.
Mostly, Michael Sikora recapped last year's finding of T cell clonal expansion in ME/CFS patients. But I liked that he made a real effort to make his talk accessible to a wider audience, and maybe it will be useful to those who want to know more about the role of T cells in the immune system. Sikora also reported on his new work looking at gene expression in plainly-expanded T cells, checking if they were behaving like typical plainly expanded T cells, primed to kill. He used single cell gene expression, which is very expensive and time-consuming, but the best way to really understand what's going on. In typically imaginative slides, he explains why it's good idea: And while this smoothie only has two fruits, the single cell approach works however many different types of cells (fruits) there there. So the key finding from his new work is that the clonally expanded T cells do indeed look like normal clonally expanded T cells, ready to kill off infected cells. For instance, they make Granzyme B, one of the key molecules they inject into cells to kill them. The top right of the diagram shows the genes expressed most strongly by cells that have undergone the most clonal expansion: I know that @Jonathan Edwards has previously suggested that the clonal expansion in ME/CFS could be non-specific, i.e. not triggered by a specific antigen. So I wondered if he thought these results shed any light on that idea?
