scholarly journals Tissue-specific transcriptional imprinting and heterogeneity in human innate lymphoid cells revealed by full-length single-cell RNA-sequencing

Cell Research ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luca Mazzurana ◽  
Paulo Czarnewski ◽  
Viktor Jonsson ◽  
Leif Wigge ◽  
Markus Ringnér ◽  
...  

AbstractThe impact of the microenvironment on innate lymphoid cell (ILC)-mediated immunity in humans remains largely unknown. Here we used full-length Smart-seq2 single-cell RNA-sequencing to unravel tissue-specific transcriptional profiles and heterogeneity of CD127+ ILCs across four human tissues. Correlation analysis identified gene modules characterizing the migratory properties of tonsil and blood ILCs, and signatures of tissue-residency, activation and modified metabolism in colon and lung ILCs. Trajectory analysis revealed potential differentiation pathways from circulating and tissue-resident naïve ILCs to a spectrum of mature ILC subsets. In the lung we identified both CRTH2+ and CRTH2− ILC2 with lung-specific signatures, which could be recapitulated by alarmin-exposure of circulating ILC2. Finally, we describe unique TCR-V(D)J-rearrangement patterns of blood ILC1-like cells, revealing a subset of potentially immature ILCs with TCR-δ rearrangement. Our study provides a useful resource for in-depth understanding of ILC-mediated immunity in humans, with implications for disease.

2016 ◽  
Vol 17 (6) ◽  
pp. 666-676 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roy Drissen ◽  
Natalija Buza-Vidas ◽  
Petter Woll ◽  
Supat Thongjuea ◽  
Adriana Gambardella ◽  
...  

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Imad Abugessaisa ◽  
Shuhei Noguchi ◽  
Melissa Cardon ◽  
Akira Hasegawa ◽  
Kazuhide Watanabe ◽  
...  

AbstractAnalysis and interpretation of single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) experiments are compromised by the presence of poor quality cells. For meaningful analyses, such poor quality cells should be excluded to avoid biases and large variation. However, no clear guidelines exist. We introduce SkewC, a novel quality-assessment method to identify poor quality single-cells in scRNA-seq experiments. The method is based on the assessment of gene coverage for each single cell and its skewness as a quality measure. To validate the method, we investigated the impact of poor quality cells on downstream analyses and compared biological differences between typical and poor quality cells. Moreover, we measured the ratio of intergenic expression, suggesting genomic contamination, and foreign organism contamination of single-cell samples. SkewC is tested in 37,993 single-cells generated by 15 scRNA-seq protocols. We envision SkewC as an indispensable QC method to be incorporated into scRNA-seq experiment to preclude the possibility of scRNA-seq data misinterpretation.


Circulation ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 142 (19) ◽  
pp. 1848-1862 ◽  
Author(s):  
David T. Paik ◽  
Lei Tian ◽  
Ian M. Williams ◽  
Siyeon Rhee ◽  
Hao Zhang ◽  
...  

Background: Endothelial cells (ECs) display considerable functional heterogeneity depending on the vessel and tissue in which they are located. Whereas these functional differences are presumably imprinted in the transcriptome, the pathways and networks that sustain EC heterogeneity have not been fully delineated. Methods: To investigate the transcriptomic basis of EC specificity, we analyzed single-cell RNA sequencing data from tissue-specific mouse ECs generated by the Tabula Muris consortium. We used a number of bioinformatics tools to uncover markers and sources of EC heterogeneity from single-cell RNA sequencing data. Results: We found a strong correlation between tissue-specific EC transcriptomic measurements generated by either single-cell RNA sequencing or bulk RNA sequencing, thus validating the approach. Using a graph-based clustering algorithm, we found that certain tissue-specific ECs cluster strongly by tissue (eg, liver, brain), whereas others (ie, adipose, heart) have considerable transcriptomic overlap with ECs from other tissues. We identified novel markers of tissue-specific ECs and signaling pathways that may be involved in maintaining their identity. Sex was a considerable source of heterogeneity in the endothelial transcriptome and we discovered Lars2 to be a gene that is highly enriched in ECs from male mice. We found that markers of heart and lung ECs in mice were conserved in human fetal heart and lung ECs. We identified potential angiocrine interactions between tissue-specific ECs and other cell types by analyzing ligand and receptor expression patterns. Conclusions: We used single-cell RNA sequencing data generated by the Tabula Muris consortium to uncover transcriptional networks that maintain tissue-specific EC identity and to identify novel angiocrine and functional relationships between tissue-specific ECs.


PLoS ONE ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. e0215481 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna L. Peters ◽  
Zhenhua Luo ◽  
Jun Li ◽  
Reena Mourya ◽  
Yunguan Wang ◽  
...  

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katelyn Donahue ◽  
Yaqing Zhang ◽  
Veerin Sirihorachai ◽  
Stephanie The ◽  
Arvind Rao ◽  
...  

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nelson Nazzicari ◽  
Danila Vella ◽  
Claudia Coronnello ◽  
Dario Di Silvestre ◽  
Riccardo Bellazzi ◽  
...  

2019 ◽  
Vol 156 (3) ◽  
pp. 812-815.e22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Werna T. Uniken Venema ◽  
Michiel D. Voskuil ◽  
Arnau Vich Vila ◽  
Gerben van der Vries ◽  
Bernadien H. Jansen ◽  
...  

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Belinda Phipson ◽  
Luke Zappia ◽  
Alicia Oshlack

AbstractSingle cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) has rapidly gained popularity for profiling transcriptomes of hundreds to thousands of single cells. This technology has led to the discovery of novel cell types and revealed insights into the development of complex tissues. However, many technical challenges need to be overcome during data generation. Due to minute amounts of starting material, samples undergo extensive amplification, increasing technical variability. A solution for mitigating amplification biases is to include Unique Molecular Identifiers (UMIs), which tag individual molecules. Transcript abundances are then estimated from the number of unique UMIs aligning to a specific gene and PCR duplicates resulting in copies of the UMI are not included in expression estimates. Here we investigate the effect of gene length bias in scRNA-Seq across a variety of datasets differing in terms of capture technology, library preparation, cell types and species. We find that scRNA-seq datasets that have been sequenced using a full-length transcript protocol exhibit gene length bias akin to bulk RNA-seq data. Specifically, shorter genes tend to have lower counts and a higher rate of dropout. In contrast, protocols that include UMIs do not exhibit gene length bias, and have a mostly uniform rate of dropout across genes of varying length. Across four different scRNA-Seq datasets profiling mouse embryonic stem cells (mESCs), we found the subset of genes that are only detected in the UMI datasets tended to be shorter, while the subset of genes detected only in the full-length datasets tended to be longer. We briefly discuss the role of these genes in the context of differential expression testing and GO analysis. In addition, despite clear differences between UMI and full-length transcript data, we illustrate that full-length and UMI data can be combined to reveal underlying biology influencing expression of mESCs.


Author(s):  
Zhirui Hu ◽  
Songpeng Zu ◽  
Jun S. Liu

AbstractA main challenge in analyzing single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNASeq) data is to reduce technical variations yet retain cell heterogeneity. Due to low mRNAs content per cell and molecule losses during the experiment (called “dropout”), the gene expression matrix has substantial zero read counts. Existing imputation methods either treat each cell or each gene identically and independently, which oversimplifies the gene correlation and cell type structure. We propose a statistical model-based approach, called SIMPLEs, which iteratively identifies correlated gene modules and cell clusters and imputes dropouts customized for individual gene module and cell type. Simultaneously, it quantifies the uncertainty of imputation and cell clustering. Optionally, SIMPLEs can integrate bulk RNASeq data for estimating dropout rates. In simulations, SIMPLEs performed significantly better than prevailing scRNASeq imputation methods by various metrics. By applying SIMPLEs to several real data sets, we discovered gene modules that can further classify subtypes of cells. Our imputations successfully recovered the expression trends of marker genes in stem cell differentiation and can discover putative pathways regulating biological processes.


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