Research Paper|Volume 13, Issue 11|pp 15595—15619

Single-cell RNA sequencing of human femoral head in vivo

Xiang Qiu¹, Ying Liu⁴, Hui Shen², Zun Wang³, Yun Gong², Junxiao Yang⁵, Xiaohua Li⁴, Huixi Zhang⁴, Yu Chen⁴, Cui Zhou⁴, Wanqiang Lv¹, Liang Cheng⁶, Yihe Hu⁵, Boyang Li¹, Wendi Shen¹, Xuezhen Zhu¹, Li-Jun Tan⁴, Hong-Mei Xiao¹, Hong-Wen Deng^1,²

¹Center for System Biology, Data Sciences, and Reproductive Health, School of Basic Medical Science, Central South University, Yuelu, Changsha 410013, China
²Tulane Center of Biomedical Informatics and Genomics, Deming Department of Medicine, School of Medicine, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA 70112, USA
³Xiangya Nursing School, Central South University, Changsha 410013, China
⁴Laboratory of Molecular and Statistical Genetics, College of Life Sciences, Human Normal University, Changsha 410081, China
⁵Department of Orthopedics, Xiangya Hospital, Central South University, Changsha 410008, China
⁶Department of Orthopedics and National Clinical Research Center for Geriatric Disorders, Xiangya Hospital, Central South University, Changsha 410008, China

Received: December 23, 2020Accepted: May 13, 2021Published: June 10, 2021

https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.203124

Copyright: © 2021 Qiu et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

The homeostasis of bone metabolism depends on the coupling and precise regulation of various types of cells in bone tissue. However, the communication and interaction between bone tissue cells at the single-cell level remains poorly understood. Thus, we performed single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) on the primary human femoral head tissue cells (FHTCs). Nine cell types were identified in 26,574 primary human FHTCs, including granulocytes, T cells, monocytes, B cells, red blood cells, osteoblastic lineage cells, endothelial cells, endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs) and plasmacytoid dendritic cells. We identified serine protease 23 (PRSS23) and matrix remodeling associated protein 8 (MXRA8) as novel bone metabolism-related genes. Additionally, we found that several subtypes of monocytes, T cells and B cells were related to bone metabolism. Cell-cell communication analysis showed that collagen, chemokine, transforming growth factor and their ligands have significant roles in the crosstalks between FHTCs. In particular, EPCs communicated with osteoblastic lineage cells closely via the "COL2A1-ITGB1" interaction pair. Collectively, this study provided an initial characterization of the cellular composition of the human FHTCs and the complex crosstalks between them at the single-cell level. It is a unique starting resource for in-depth insights into bone metabolism.