UCLA

Studying the spatial organization of the molecules in T cell following activation of the T cell antigen receptor can improve our understanding of the association of the spatial structure of the molecules with T cell activation states. In particular, it has been found that the formation of the signaling complex is tightly related to proper signal transduction and T cell activation during the immune response. The purpose of this work is to discover the relationship between the spatial structure of the molecules in the signaling complex and the state of T cell by extracting biological knowledge from cellular imaging data using spatial point process methods.In this thesis, we present discoveries on spatial distributions and attributes of proteins in microcluster and non-microcluster areas of three activated T cells and compare the differences between the spatial distributions in microcluster and non-microcluster. This thesis attempts to propose some possible biological hypotheses based on strong statistical evidence discovered from spatial point pattern analysis.