Severe infections can leave lasting imprints on the immune system beyond adaptive immunity. During my Ph.D., I discovered that severe COVID-19 establishes durable epigenetic and transcriptional changes in HSPCs that persist for months to over a year post-infection.
Using single-cell multi-omic profiling (ATAC-seq + RNA-seq), I characterized how bone marrow progenitors undergo chromatin remodeling that is conveyed to differentiated monocytes, contributing to prolonged inflammatory phenotypes. I developed the PBMC-PIE (Progenitor Input Enrichment) workflow to analyze rare circulating HSPCs from standard blood draws, enabling non-invasive study of hematopoietic reprogramming in human patients.
Cheong JG et al. Cell (2023) · DOI