About
Right after birth, both the brain and the immune system are bombarded with new stimuli in the environment and must quickly adapt to handle them. While the brain is getting used to diverse visual stimuli, tastes and textures, the immune system learns to recognize and protect the body from pathogens while supporting a commensal microbiome. Can maturation of the immune system and the brain be linked? Perturbations of immunity in young children, such as inborn genetic errors of immunity, strong infection or allergies were linked to alterations in brain development, linked to e.g. ADHD symptoms, suggest this possibility to be true. In the lab, we test this hypothesis by studying the nature of immune cells seeding the brain borders along the post-natal development and investigating their possible roles in shaping brain formation during this developmental window. We are also looking at how this immune-brain crosstalk in development can be disrupted by infections and perturbations of microbiota.