Multi-omics investigation of blood cell development

Blood transfusions, bone marrow stem cells transplantations and immunotherapies are cornerstones of medical and cancer treatments. Pluripotent stem cells could represent an unlimited, and much needed, source for these therapeutically relevant cell products. However, our ability to produce these cells is limited by our lack of deep understanding of blood development. In addition, understanding embryonic blood development would also provide invaluable clues on the cellular origin and mechanisms of development of infant leukaemia. The main aim of this PhD project is to investigate the development of the blood system using state of the art in vivo/in vitro mouse models, flow cytometry, haematopoietic assays, single-cell omics approaches (single-cell RNA and ATAC-seq, spatial transcriptomic) combined with advanced bioinformatic integration of large scale high dimensional single-cell multi-modal omics.