long-term-vivo-tracking-inflammatory-cell-dynamics-within-drosophila

Long-term <em>In Vivo</em> Tracking of Inflammatory Cell Dynamics Within <em>Drosophila</em> Pupae

During the rapid inflammatory response to tissue damage, cells of the innate immune system are quickly recruited to the injury site. Once at the wound, ...

University of Bristol

Macrophages are multifunctional cells that perform diverse roles in health and disease. Emerging evidence has suggested that these innate immune cells might also be capable of developing immunological memory, a trait previously associated with the adaptive system alone. While recent studies have focused on the dramatic macrophage reprogramming that follows infection and protects against secondary microbial attack, can macrophages also develop memory in response to other cues? Here, we show that apoptotic corpse engulfment by Drosophila macrophages is an essential primer for their inflammatory response to tissue damage and infection in vivo. Priming is triggered via calcium-induced JNK signaling, which leads to upregulation of the damage receptor Draper, thus providing a molecular memory that allows the cell to rapidly respond to subsequent injury or infection. This remarkable plasticity and capacity for memory places macrophages as key therapeutic targets for treatment of inflammatory disorders. 

Corpse Engulfment Generates a Molecular Memory that Primes the Macrophage Inflammatory Response.

In the acute inflammatory phase following tissue damage, cells of the innate immune system are rapidly recruited to sites of injury by pro-inflammatory mediators released at the wound site. Although advances in live imaging allow us to directly visualize this process in vivo, the precise identity and properties of the primary immune damage attractants remain unclear, as it is currently impossible to directly observe and accurately measure these signals in tissues. Here, we demonstrate that detailed information about the attractant signals can be extracted directly from the in vivo behavior of the responding immune cells. By applying inference-based computational approaches to analyze the in vivo dynamics of the Drosophila inflammatory response, we gain new detailed insight into the spatiotemporal properties of the attractant gradient. In particular, we show that the wound attractant is released by wound margin cells, rather than by the wounded tissue per se, and that it diffuses away from this source at rates far slower than those of previously implicated signals such as H2O2 and ATP, ruling out these fast mediators as the primary chemoattractant. We then predict, and experimentally test, how competing attractant signals might interact in space and time to regulate multi-step cell navigation in the complex environment of a healing wound, revealing a period of receptor desensitization after initial exposure to the damage attractant. Extending our analysis to model much larger wounds, we uncover a dynamic behavioral change in the responding immune cells in vivo that is prognostic of whether a wound will subsequently heal or not. VIDEO ABSTRACT.

Systems Analysis of the Dynamic Inflammatory Response to Tissue Damage Reveals Spatiotemporal Properties of the Wound Attractant Gradient.

Spatial structures often constrain the 3D movement of cells or particles in vivo, yet this information is obscured when microscopy data are analyzed using standard approaches. Here, we present methods, called unwrapping and Riemannian manifold learning, for mapping particle-tracking data along unseen and irregularly curved surfaces onto appropriate 2D representations. This is conceptually similar to the problem of reconstructing accurate geography from conventional Mercator maps, but our methods do not require prior knowledge of the environments' physical structure. Unwrapping and Riemannian manifold learning accurately recover the underlying 2D geometry from 3D imaging data without the need for fiducial marks. They outperform standard x-y projections, and unlike standard dimensionality reduction techniques, they also successfully detect both bias and persistence in cell migration modes. We demonstrate these features on simulated data and zebrafish and Drosophila in vivo immune cell trajectory datasets. Software packages that implement unwrapping and Riemannian manifold learning are provided. 

Accurate Reconstruction of Cell and Particle Tracks from 3D Live Imaging Data.

Drosophila macrophages exhibit functional parallels with their vertebrate counterparts in both their early developmental roles and later diverse roles in health and disease. This, together with the fly's genetic tractability and opportunities for live imaging, has recently established Drosophila as a powerful model to study macrophage behavior in vivo.

Helen Weavers

School of Biochemistry,
Biomedical Sciences,
School of Cellular and Molecular Medicine,
School of Biochemistry, Biomedical Sciences,
School of Cellular and Molecular Medicine, Biomedical Sciences

University of Bristol

Long-term In Vivo Tracking of Inflammatory Cell Dynamics Within Drosophila Pupae

Helen Weavers

School of Biochemistry,Biomedical Sciences,School of Cellular and Molecular Medicine,School of Biochemistry, Biomedical Sciences,School of Cellular and Molecular Medicine, Biomedical Sciences

University of Bristol

Long-term In Vivo Tracking of Inflammatory Cell Dynamics Within Drosophila Pupae

School of Biochemistry,
Biomedical Sciences,
School of Cellular and Molecular Medicine,
School of Biochemistry, Biomedical Sciences,
School of Cellular and Molecular Medicine, Biomedical Sciences