To help defend the host from pathogens and maintain tissue homeostasis, neutrophils—the most abundant immune cell in our body—need to generate physical forces to move, interact with their environments and kill their targets. Our lab aims to understand how neutrophils generate and transmit the physical forces needed for their host defense functions. Such knowledge will open the door to biophysics-inspired strategies for controlling and re-engineering neutrophil functions to improve immune responses. In this talk, I will discuss our lab’s current work toward understanding how neutrophils remodel and rupture the nucleus and plasma membrane to release chromatin to the extracellular environment during NETosis—an immune response that worsens inflammation. Our work identified novel mechanisms by which chromatin regulates the mechanical properties of cells, independent of gene expression, materially advancing our understanding of the biophysical roles of chromatin in cell physiology.
Benyamin Rosental (Sun,) studied this question.