Strand Group

Project Description

It is widely known that human prostate diseases (BPH and cancer) are located in specific anatomical regions, but these regions are defined by ambiguous morphological criteria. To understand the cellular changes in disease we must first understand the cellular anatomy of the normal prostate. To accomplish this, we partnered with a local organ transplant alliance to collect fresh young human prostate specimens. We used single cell sequencing to identify known and novel cell types and optimized new flow cytometry panels based on the single cell data to isolate each cell type. We also used the single cell data to find anchor genes that could selectively identify these cell types in prostate whole mounts and discovered that the distribution of the two novel epithelial cell types we discovered also demarcate prostate zonal anatomy.