Resolving cellular and transcriptional dynamics in inflammatory muscle diseases

• Honours
• PhD

This project aims to investigate and define the cellular heterogeneity and transcriptional networks that drive myositis, a heterogeneous and poorly understood group of chronic inflammatory muscle diseases.

Leveraging our existing biobank of clinically annotated muscle biopsies and matched controls, and a complementary mouse model of myositis, this project will develop and implement single nuclei genomics approaches to define cell type–specific transcriptional states and map non-coding regulatory elements active in diseased versus healthy muscle and infiltrating immune cells.

Bioinformatic analyses and experimental perturbations in cultured muscle cell lines will identify how inflammation disrupts gene regulation and contributes to tissue damage.

This work will advance understanding of how chronic inflammation reprograms transcriptional networks in myositis, informing potential strategies to restore normal gene expression and muscle function.

This is a collaborative student project jointly between the King lab (Genetics and Gene Regulation Division) and the Wicks lab (Inflammation Division). Dr Jessica Day (Wicks Lab) is a rheumatologist and clinician scientist with clinical and academic expertise in myositis, whose work spans innovative clinical studies, building a new inter-institutional myositis biobank and laboratory-based discovery projects.

The King lab studies how defects in the control of gene expression are involved in human immune-mediated diseases, and will provide experimental and bioinformatic expertise to supervised planned single-cell genomic assays and analyses.

Prospective applicants should ideally have some experience and understanding of human immunology, single-cell genomics, functional genomics (ie ATAC-seq, CUT&TAG), and bioinformatics.