PLOS Science Wednesday: Hi reddit, my name is Daniel and I organized the
Dicty World Race, which compared the motility and chemotaxis in
engineered cell lines, as described in our PLOS ONE study – Ask Me
Anything!
Abstract
Hi reddit, my name is Daniel Irimia and I am an Associate Professor in
the Surgery Department at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard
Medical School, and a Senior Investigator at Shriners Burns Hospital in
Boston. My research focuses on designing novel technologies for
measuring the activities of white blood cells from patients, towards
better ways to predict, diagnose, monitor, and treat inflammation,
infections, and sepsis. In 2016, I received the “Pioneers of
Miniaturization” prize from the Chemical and Biological Microsystems
Society, for pioneering work on microfluidic technologies for measuring
human neutrophil activities and applications to human diseases. I am the
organizer of the recent Dicty World Race, an unorthodox approach aimed
at encouraging biologists to employ emerging microfluidic technologies
to make high precision measurements of cell migration for biological and
medical research applications. The results and learning from this
experiment were recently published as an article titled “A Worldwide
Competition to Compare the Speed and Chemotactic Accuracy of
Neutrophil-Like Cells” in PLOS ONE. The race enabled a large-scale
comparison of motility and chemotaxis in the engineered cell lines,
allowing exploration of a diverse set of strategies for enhancing
chemotactic performance. We found that there are tradeoffs between cell
speed and chemotactic accuracy in maze-like environments and that the
winning cells were not the fastest cell type, but excelled in finding
the shortest paths through the maze. These findings could eventually
help us develop better therapies against infections and chronic
inflammation. Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter @D__Irimia. I will
be answering your questions at 1pm ET – Ask Me Anything!