title: A perspective on single cell behavior during infection.
abstract: The interface between immune cells and intracellular bacterial pathogens produces complex, diverse interactions. During individual encounters, highly adaptable and dynamic host cells and bacteria vary in their responses, thereby contributing to well-documented heterogeneous outcomes of infection. The challenge now is to break down the multidimensionality of these interactions into informative readouts of population physiology and predictors of responses to infection. We recently reported one approach to this challenge that couples single cell RNA-seq analysis with fluorescent markers to characterize infection phenotype.1We detected bacterial subpopulations that elicit profoundly different host responses to infection in the specific host cells that they infect. Here we describe how heterogeneity might be maintained in populations of host and pathogens and discuss the advantages that heterogeneity confers to bacteria during infection and to host cells for eradicating a pathogen. We propose that single cell studies will allow the unraveling of host-pathogen biology and lead to an understanding of how the sum of individual encounters leads to the infection outcome of a whole organism.
authors.affiliation: a Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard , Cambridge , MA.
authors.forename: Roi
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Avraham
authors.affiliation: a Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard , Cambridge , MA.|b Department of Molecular Biology , Massachusetts General Hospital , Boston , MA , USA.|c Center for Computational and Integrative Biology, Massachusetts General Hospital , Boston , MA , USA.|d Department of Microbiology and Immunobiology , Harvard Medical School , Boston , MA , USA.
authors.forename: Deborah T
authors.initials: DT
authors.lastname: Hung
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001419:Bacteria / Q000166:cytology* / Q000235:genetics / Q000254:growth & development / Q000378:metabolism; D001424:Bacterial Infections / Q000382:microbiology* / Q000503:physiopathology; D001426:Bacterial Proteins / Q000235:genetics / Q000378:metabolism; D054884:Host-Pathogen Interactions; D006801:Humans
chemical_list: D001426:Bacterial Proteins
keywords: heterogeneity; host-pathogen; immunity; intracellular bacteria; single-cell