Tissue organisation and cellular composition (toponomics) of follicular lymphoma

滤泡性淋巴瘤（FL）是一种罕见的淋巴瘤，表现为继发性结构。淋巴瘤细胞生长不混乱，但在组织学上可识别的结构（滤泡）。与上皮性肿瘤相反，这种二级结构构成淋巴瘤形成的例外。它可能是由微环境诱导的，微环境由非肿瘤性T细胞和树突状细胞组成。基因表达分析表明微环境与疾病的临床过程之间存在关联。到目前为止，对微环境如何与淋巴瘤细胞相互作用以及预后基因表达特征如何转化为免疫组织化学替代标记物的更深入了解还缺乏。有没有足够的细胞系和动物模型可供FL。在这个项目中，我们计划分析复杂的架构和FL的细胞组成的荧光多染色和数字图像分析的手段。获得创新的组织学参数，以恢复可用的基因表达数据。

Follicular lymphoma (FL) is one of the rare lymphomas presenting with a secondary architecture. The lymphoma cells do not grow chaotically, but in histologically recognizable structures (follicles). In contrast to epithelial tumors, such a secondary architecture constitutes an exception among lymphoid neoplasias. It is probably induced by the microenvironment, which consists of non-neoplastic T-cells and dendritic cells. Gene-expression analyses have shown an association between the microenvironment and the clinical course of the disease. A deeper understanding of how the microenvironment interacts with lymphoma cells and how the prognostic gene-expression signatures could be translated into immunohistochemical surrogate markers is lacking so far. There are no adequate cell-lines and animal models available for FL. Within this project we plan to analyse the complex architecture and the cellular composition of FL by the means of fluorescence multi-staining and digital image analysis. Innovative histological parameters are obtained to re-interprete available gene-expression data.