Fig. 1.

The wealth of human data for translational immunology. Consented cohorts of healthy donors and people in immune-perturbed conditions such as during illness, treatment, and immunization can provide insights into human immunity and disease-specific immune responses. Technologies now exist that allow us to study numerous sample types, including blood, tissue biopsies, saliva, urine, and feces, among others. Such samples are usually processed and banked, then run all together to limit batch variation. Depending on the questions to be answered, various assays can be run individually or in combination to gain insights into health or disease processes. These can include immune-cell-specificity assays (restimulation, tetramer staining, or repertoire analysis), broad phenotyping (flow and mass cytometry, RNAseq), functional readouts (cytotoxicity, metabolite detection, proliferation, or differentiation), or environmental contributions (microbiome or virome)