Understanding the immunomodulatory activity of pharmaceuticals in zebrafish using high content imaging and phenotypic profiling

The aim of this project is to integrate cutting-edge high-content (HC)-imaging technologies and big data analysis to advance our understanding of how pharmaceuticals modulate immune responses in fish.
Three objectives are proposed:
1) Adopt an innovative HC-cell-imaging technique, called Cell Painting, to characterise the phenotypic signature of isolated zebrafish cells (neutrophils, fibroblast-like ZF4) exposed to pharmaceuticals.
2) Utilise confocal microscopy to quantify the effect of pharmaceuticals on neutrophil dynamics in-vivo using non-protected transgenic zebrafish larvae.
3) Develop a computational pipeline that integrates in-vitro and in-vivo phenotypic and functional data (1300+ parameters) to characterise the fish-specific immunomodulatory activity profile of pharmaceuticals.