Teng-Jui Lin was selected for Future Leader in Chemical Engineering Award and presented his research at the award symposium.
The highly selective research symposium elects the finest undergraduate researchers of the graduating class in the United States to present their research. Students are recognized for their academic achievement, research contribution, and potential in academia and industry as future leaders in chemical and biomolecular engineering.
Title: Quantifying microglia morphology across neuroinflammatory rat models with unsupervised machine learning
Abstract: Microglia, the brain’s immune cells, change morphology in response to neuroinflammation and therapeutics. However, we lack robust and high-throughput software for quantitative morphological analysis to understand microglia’s reactivity to neuroinflammation. We optimized an image-based morphological analysis method based on unsupervised machine learning in Python to cluster microglia into shape modes. We applied the method to images from two ex vivo rat brain slice models that induce neuroinflammation. The determined shape modes capture regional variation and injury and treatment response of microglia morphology in both models. When comparing injury groups with the non-treated control group, morphological features show time, dose, and region-dependent changes. Therapeutic treatment group reverses most changes to the level of control group. In future studies, we will investigate the role of mitochondria-induced energy failure in activating microglia’s morphological response to neuroinflammation and define the relationship between microglia and mitochondria morphology and functional states using our machine learning method. By quantifying and linking microglia’s morphological response to neuroinflammation and functional states across conditions, our method enables non-destructive assessment of microglial reactivity to inflammation and therapeutic performance across disease models.
Link: https://www.cbe.ncsu.edu/research/future-leaders-in-chemical-engineering/meet-the-awardees/ (2022)
