Pitt Pediatrics congratulates Timothy Hand, PhD for his recent senior author publication in Cell Host and Microbe titled, “Single-cell detection and quantification of the microbiota by MicFLY.” Hand is the Director of the Gnotobiotic Animal Core Laboratory as well as an Associate Professor of Pediatrics in our Division of Infectious Diseases. He is also a Scholar with our Richard King Mellon Foundation Institute for Pediatric Research and the Director of the Institute of Infection, Inflammation, and Immunity in Children (i4Kids). 
Other authors on this research affiliated with our Department of Pediatrics include first author Christine Tin, PhD, Darryl Abbott, PhD, Aditi Lohar, Tiffany Taylor, PhD, Kacey Sullinger, Matthew Butoryak, and William DePas, PhD.
This fascinating and collaborative work, which includes efforts from other sites such as the Children’s Hospital of Pennsylvania and Grossman School of Medicine at New York University, among others, focuses on the importance of the gut microbiome in a number of functions, such as digestion and the development of the immune system. While this is known, up to this point in time, however, current methods of understanding and measuring a gut’s microbiota has been limited to relative abundance of bacteria. Ultimately, current tools remain somewhat broad in approach, rather than highly specific.
In addressing this lack of specificity, Hand and the research team theorized that an increase in understanding microbiome biology including the dynamics behind shifts in microbiota composition through qualitative, single-cell bacterial measurements would shift the scope of understanding how gut microbiome changes and how those changes may contribute to various diseases. The researchers therefore developed a new single-cell technology that quantifies absolute bacterial abundance with species-level resolution called microbiota flow cytometry (MicFLY).
MicFLY is effective at identifying the major intestinal taxa, distinguishing between live and dead bacteria, measuring heterogeneous mRNA expression, and concurrently quantifying immunoglobulin A (IgA) and IgG binding to intestinal bacteria. The researchers tested MicFLY on a small cohort of preterm infants, discovering that increases in IgA- and IgG-unbound bacteria from various Enterobacteriaceae species associate with the development of necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC).
This early research demonstrates the ability of MicFLY single-cell technology to measure microbiota in fine-scale quantitative units, allowing for a greater understanding of compositional changes and their affect on immunity and other large scale bodily functioning.
Join us in congratulating Hand and his research team on this significant and important research. And follow Pitt Pediatrics on Bluesky for future updates on faculty research, publications, and advances.