The immune system must distinguish self from non-self if it is to fight infection without attacking the body itself. Developing T cells learn that balance in the thymus, where they are taught which antigens belong to us and which do not.
The Meyer Lab works at this interface of education and repertoire design. We want to understand how thymic organisation and cell–cell interactions instill tolerance, and how that process shapes the diversity and cross-reactivity of T cell receptors that emerge.
To get there we move between computation and experiment: building in silico and statistical models of selection, analysing genomics data from mouse and human thymus, and using imaging to place molecular programmes back in tissue context. Along the way we also build tools for predicting when a TCR will recognise related peptide variants.
Much of our current effort asks how cellular and molecular diversity arises in the human thymic epithelium and what evolutionary principles govern TCR repertoires, with the longer aim of assembling these pieces into a coherent model of central tolerance.
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