体液免疫调控机制，是中和抗体疫苗开发、抗体介导自免疫病疗法研究的理论基础。既往研究往往局限于细胞、分子水平的静态分析，而忽略了对体液应答质量产生决定性影响的组织、细胞间动态互作与机制。本创新群体以“长江学者”、“杰出青年”祁海教授为学术带头人，以石彦教授、刘万里研究员、刘磊教授为骨干力量，拥有动态细胞免疫学所需的互补专业背景，通过合作已在体液免疫调控领域取得诸多成果，在双光子在体成像、单细胞成像、细胞力学分析、合成化学与光控细胞生物学等方面建立了成熟的技术平台。群体将以体液免疫应答、生发中心反应调控为核心问题，以对体液应答起决定性作用的T细胞、B细胞、树突状细胞的动态细胞免疫生物学为切入点，深入探索滤泡辅助T细胞调控抗体亲和力成熟的机制，生发中心B细胞受体信号转导与命运决定的机制，以及树突状细胞调控滤泡辅助型与调节型T细胞发育的机制，有望在“体液免疫调控的动态细胞免疫学”方向做出新突破。

Understanding of humoral immune regulation is essential for rational design of vaccines based on neutralizing antibodies and therapies against autoantibody-mediated inflammatory diseases. However, past research has typically been limited to static analyses of molecules and cells involved in the humoral immune response while largely ignored spatiotemporally dynamic cell and tissue behaviors and associated mechanisms that are of fundamental importance to the quality of the response. The proposed Innovative Research Group is led by Dr. Hai Qi, a “Cheung Kong Scholar” of the Ministry of Education and a “Distinguished Young Scholar” of the Natural Science Foundation of China, and Dr. Yan Shi, Dr. Wanli Liu, and Dr. Lei Liu. This interdisciplinary research team is endowed with complimentary research expertise among its members, whose previous and ongoing collaborations have led to significant discoveries in the field of humoral immune regulation and to well-established technical platforms in intravital 2-photon microscopy, single-cell imaging, cellular mechanics, synthetic chemistry and photo-manipulation for dynamic immunobiological studies. Future efforts of the team will be focused on humoral immune regulation and the germinal center reaction, aiming to dissect dynamic immunobiology of helper T cells, B cells, and dendritic cells, the three most important cell types of humoral immune regulation. Specifically, the team aims to unravel mechanisms by which follicular T helper cells control affinity maturation, to understand how signal transduction in germinal center B cells control fate determination, and to reveal how dendritic cells regulate the generation of follicular T helper and T regulatory cells. These studies are expected to vertically improve our basic understanding of humoral immune regulation.