I worked closely with colleagues in LJI’s John and Susan Major Center for Clinical Investigation to plan experiments and set up protocols to safeguard health and privacy for the study participants. Once the project was approved, LJI’s clinical team began recruiting participants for our study.

I am happy to report that we successfully obtained the donor samples we needed, from which we can extract the subsets of white blood cells that we are interested in. The next step was to carry out a single-cell multiomics experiment on the control and combined cohorts. This is a technique that allows me to simultaneously study which genes are being expressed by each cell—a good proxy for cellular function that also allows us to classify each cell into a cell type, such as B cells and T cells—as well as chromatin accessibility, which helps us understand the three-dimensional organization of DNA in the cell nucleus. I am grateful for my colleagues in the NGS Core at LJI, whose expertise was crucial for my project. I am currently working on incorporating these two modalities to better understand how hormonal birth control may influence immune cells.