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Chris Brooke

@christopherbrooke.bsky.social

1.5K followers 567 following 66 posts

Viral evolution, immunity, and infection biology. Professor at University of Minnesota. brookelab.org

Posts Replies Media

Chris Brooke @christopherbrooke.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

Excited to announce that we are moving the lab to Minneapolis to join the University of Minnesota Department of Microbiology & Immunology and Institute on Infectious Diseases this summer!! We will be hiring so please reach out if interested in viral evolution, viral immunology, etc.!!

Sunset view of the Mississippi river and beautiful downtown Minneapolis

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Chris Brooke @christopherbrooke.bsky.social · 18/03/2025

11) We targeted each of the top hits and found that OASL knockdown resulted in a significant reduction in IFN induction after IAV infection. This was also true when we blocked OASL up-regulation.

IFN reporter assay results performed on supernatant collected form A549 cells treated with the indicated siRNAs and infected with IAV for 8 hrs.

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Chris Brooke @christopherbrooke.bsky.social · 18/03/2025

10) It turns out that a subset of cells within any given cell population express these ISGs in the absence of stimuli. This was true both in transformed cell lines as well as in primary human bronchial epithelial cells differentiated at the air-liquid interface.

Single cell RNAseq data from uninfected, untreated primary normal human bronchial epithelial cell cultures from 4 donors, differentiated at the air-liquid interface. Plots show the percentages of each cell type that express the indicated ISG.

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Chris Brooke @christopherbrooke.bsky.social · 18/03/2025

9) To our surprise, all the top hits were well known interferon stimulated genes (ISGs)...genes that are most famous for getting turned on in response to IFN. Why were ISGs showing up in uninfected/unstimulated cells as correlates of IFN induction potential?

Heat map showing correlation between expression levels in uninfected cells and inferred probability of expressing IFN after infection (top 20 hits shown).

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Chris Brooke @christopherbrooke.bsky.social · 18/03/2025

7) This approach allowed us to reconstruct how individual cells move through transcriptional state space from pre-infection to post-infection states:

Pseudotime reconstruction of A549 cells during IAV infection, showing movement of cells through time from pre-infection state (upper right) to two major post-infection states: IFN+ and IFN-

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Chris Brooke @christopherbrooke.bsky.social · 18/03/2025

2) Many groups (including ours) have shown that the interferon (IFN) response is generally initiated by a small subset of cells during infection with IAV or other viruses. The rarity of IFN+ cells during infection is a bit of a surprise given the critical importance of IFN for host defense.

Single cell RNAseq data in which each dot represents the transcriptome of a single cell infected with A/Perth/16/2009, collected 16 hrs post-infection. Cells are colored red if they express detectable IFNL1, grey if they do not.

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Chris Brooke @christopherbrooke.bsky.social · 09/09/2024

We have an open faculty search for TWO positions in microbiology and virology at the University of Illinois! We have world class core facilities and a fantastic collaborative group of young faculty...you could be next! Please re-post/skeet!

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Chris Brooke @christopherbrooke.bsky.social · 05/10/2023

All too easy

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Chris Brooke @christopherbrooke.bsky.social · 05/10/2023

Excited to welcome @themenacherylab.bsky.social here to Illinois to give a seminar in the only way that seems right:

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Chris Brooke @christopherbrooke.bsky.social · 05/09/2023

We have an open virology faculty search at the University of Illinois! We have world class core facilities and a fantastic collaborative group of young faculty working on cutting edge questions in virus biology...you could be next! Please re-post/RT/re-bleet/whatever it is called here!

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