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Neuroimmunology Laboratory, Trinity College Dublin

Email: mjdolan@tcd.ie

Research Interests

We are interested in how the brain and immune system interface to drive neurobiology in health, disease and repair. We are particularly focused on microglia, the brain’s resident macrophages, and how these cells respond to injury or damage. We and others have found that microglia can adopt several coexisting subtypes, called “states”. However, how these states are formed and their downstream functions and interactions with other cells, remain unknown. To address this question we leverage molecular and genomic technologies to understand microglia biology using in vitro and in vivo models.

The Neuroimmunology lab is also a member of the SFI FutureNeuro Research Centre and Trinity College’s Institute of Neuroscience.

Brain macrophages (Microglia) During White Matter Repair

Relevant publications:

1. Goeva A, Dolan M-J, Luu J, Garcia E, Boiarsky R, Gupta RM, Macosko E (2023) HiDDEN: A machine learning label refinement method for detection of disease-relevant populations in case-control single-cell transcriptomics Biorxiv (In Press at Nature Comms) doi.org/10.1101/2023.01.06.523013
2. Dolan M-J, Therrien T*, Jereb S, Kamath T, Gazestani V, Atkeson T, Marsh S, Goeva A, Lojek N, Murphy S, Joung J , Liu B, Limone F, Eggan K, Hacohen N, Bernstein B, Glass C, Leinonen V, Blurton-Jones M, Zhang F, Epstein C, Macosko E, Stevens B. (2023) Exposure of iPSC-derived human microglia to brain substrates enables the generation and manipulation of diverse transcriptional states in vitro Nature Immunology doi.org/10.1038/s41590-023-01558-2.