The immunology field, from very early on, invested great efforts and ingenuity to characterize the immune cell types and elucidate their function, pathways and crosstalk. These discoveries were instrumental for both basic science and immunotherapy. However, resent scientific discoveries from my lab and others indicated that current schemes only partly describe the diversity of immune cell types and their role in physiology and disease, ranging from cancer to neurodegeneration (Jaitin et al., Science 2014; Paul et al., Cell 2015; Matcovitch et al., Science 2016; Gury et al., Cell 2016, Jaitin et al Cell 2016; Medagalia et al., Science 2017; Keren-Shaul et al., Cell 2017; Goldberg et al., Nature Cell Biology 2018; Bornstein et al., Nature 2018; Cohen et al., Cell 2018; Ledergor et al., Nature Medicine 2018; Li et al., Cell 2019). We were the first to develop and apply single cell genomics towards elucidating the diversity of the immune system and demonstrated how single cell technologies can dramatically advance the way we characterize complex immune assemblies and study their spatial organization, clonal distribution, dynamics, pathways, crosstalk and function, in both physiological and pathological contexts (Jaitin et al., Science 2014; Paul et al., Cell 2015; Giladi et al., Cell 2017). For that, we will continue to push the boundaries of single-cell genomic technologies and their implementation in Immunology research; we developed state of the art single cell approaches that combine transcriptional profiles with other modalities such as genome engineering, spatial tissue location, signalling, cell-to-cell interactions and the epigenome. (Medagalia et al., Science 2017 Giladi et al Nature Biotechnology 2020), these are expected to dramatically impact basic immunology and immunotherapy research.
