Year 2

During the past funding period several significant advances were made towards each of the three aims of the proposal. We found that innate immune receptors were critically important to engraftment of hematopoietic stem cells and we have begun to understand how engraftment is enhanced in the absence of some of these receptors. We also discovered important aspects of the biology of the KO cells and how they might confer better engraftment. Our ongoing studies are focused on the mechanistic factors that lead to enhanced hematopoietic stem cell engraftment in our model.