WEHI Wednesday Seminar hosted by Professor Andreas Strasser

Dr Julia Marchingo
NHMRC Emerging Leadership Fellow (EL2) and Senior Research Officer, Strasser Laboratory – Cancer division, WEHI

Mapping CD8 T cell immunity: What protein tells us that mRNA alone cannot

Davis Auditorium

Join via SLIDO enter code #WEHIWednesday

Including Q&A session

CD8 T cells are central mediators of adaptive immunity, but their function becomes impaired during chronic infection and cancer. This state, known as T cell exhaustion, remains a substantial barrier to effective anti-viral and anti-cancer immunity. Proteins enact almost all cellular activity and are the targets of most therapeutic interventions. However, systematic molecular profiling of in vivo CD8 T cell responses has so far relied heavily on transcriptomics, leaving post-transcriptional protein-level changes to T cell phenotype and function substantially underexplored.

In this seminar, Dr Marchingo will detail a first-of-its-kind integrated proteome-transcriptome atlas of in vivo murine CD8 T cell differentiation across naïve, proliferating, effector, memory, and exhausted states during acute and chronic LCMV infection. She will highlight previously unappreciated features of the CD8 T cell response that are undetectable by transcriptomics alone and discuss what this reveals about the post-transcriptional regulatory programs shaping T cell immunity.

Dr Julia Marchingo is an NHMRC Emerging Leadership Fellow (EL2) and Senior Research Officer in the Cancer Division. She completed her PhD at WEHI in 2015 with Prof Philip Hodgkin and Dr Susanne Heinzel, combining quantitative biological and mathematical techniques to predict how complex signal integration determines immune response magnitude. She then joined Prof Doreen Cantrell’s laboratory at the University of Dundee, Scotland (2016–2021), where she expanded her quantitative biology expertise into T cell signalling, immunometabolism and mass spectrometry. Since returning to Melbourne, she has led a small research team in the laboratory of Prof Andreas Strasser, developing low-input proteomics approaches to explore quantitative cellular and molecular drivers of impaired versus effective T cell immunity.

All welcome!