Research Trainee Presentations at Keystone Symposium
Three of our MFM research staff and trainees presented work at the Keystone Symposium - Immunometabolism Across Scales: From Cells to Systems to Healthspan recently! Learn more about their work below.
Megan Le, Student Research Assistant, MFM
Oral Presentation: Metabolic Profiling Identifies Distinct Immune Cell Phenotypes at the Maternal-Fetal Interface Across Pregnancy
What are some of the key takeaways from your presentation?
"My work demonstrates that immune cells at the maternal–fetal interface undergo dynamic metabolic shifts across pregnancy rather than maintaining a static metabolic state. These changes suggest that immune function is tightly linked to gestational stage and metabolic activity."
What did you find most interesting about this work?
"The most interesting part of this work was that our results differed from our original hypothesis. While we expected first-trimester immune cells at the maternal–fetal interface to rely primarily on glycolysis, we instead found increased reliance on fatty acid synthesis and mitochondrial respiration, which has motivated me to further investigate the pregnancy-specific mechanisms driving this shift."
Raheen Zaidi, Student Research Assistant, MFM
Poster Presentation: Characterization of Mitochondria in Human Decidual Immune Cells Across Gestation
What are some of the key takeaways from your poster?
"Some key takeaways from my poster are that relative to the second and third trimesters, the first trimester of human pregnancy carries the most abundance of mitochondria in various types of immune cells, such as in macrophages, NK cells, CD4 T cells and CD8 T cells"
What did you find most interesting about this work?
"Something I though was very interesting is that despite this increase in mitochondrial volume, the mitochondrial activity only increased macrophage cells."
Claire Truongdang, Research Technologist, MFM
Poster Presentation: Glutamine Uptake of Placenta Immune Cells Varies Across Gestation
What are some of the key takeaways from your poster?
"There is a difference in glutamine utilization of immune cells across trimesters of pregnancy! Overall, second trimester utilizes more glutamine than other trimesters."
What did you find most interesting about this work?
"Immunometabolism is a ‘hot field’ now but not much is focused on pregnancy. In this conference, I can only find one other group does OBGYN-related research, the rest are cancer dominantly, so hopefully there will more attention to us in the future!"