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Research Paper|Volume 13, Issue 21|pp 24432—24448

Immune cell and TCR/BCR repertoire profiling in systemic lupus erythematosus patients by single-cell sequencing

Fengping Zheng1, Huixuan Xu2, Cantong Zhang2, Xiaoping Hong3, Dongzhou Liu3, Donge Tang2, Zuying Xiong1, Yong Dai2
  • 1Department of Nephrology, Peking University Shenzhen Hospital, Shenzhen Peking University-The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Medical Center, Shenzhen 518020, Guangdong, China
  • 2Clinical Medical Research Center, Guangdong Provincial Engineering Research Center of Autoimmune Disease Precision Medicine, Shenzhen Engineering Research Center of Autoimmune Disease, The Second Clinical Medical College, Shenzhen People's Hospital, Jinan University, Shenzhen 518020, Guangdong, China
  • 3Department of Rheumatology and Immunology, The Second Clinical Medical College, Shenzhen People's Hospital, Jinan University, Shenzhen 518020, Guangdong, China
Received: August 9, 2021Accepted: October 27, 2021Published: November 12, 2021
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.203695

Copyright: © 2021 Zheng 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 immune cells and the repertoire of T cells and B cells play an important role in the pathogenesis of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). Exploring their expression and distribution in SLE can help us better understand this lethal autoimmune disease. In this study, we used a single-cell 5’ RNA sequence and single-cell T cell receptor (TCR)/B cell receptor (BCR) to study the immune cells and the repertoire from ten SLE patients and the paired normal controls (NC). The results showed that 9732 cells correspondence to 12 cluster immune cell types were identified in NC, whereas 11042 cells correspondence to 16 cluster immune cell types were identified in SLE. The results demonstrated that neutrophil, macrophage, and dendritic cells were accumulated in SLE by annotating the immune cell types. Besides, the bioinformatics analysis of differentially expressed genes (DEGs) in these cell types indicates their role in inflammation response. In addition, patients with SLE showed increased TCR and BCR clonotypes compared with the healthy controls. Furthermore, patients with SLE showed biased usage of TCR and BCR V(D)J genes. Taken together, we characterized the transcriptome and TCR/BCR immune repertoire profiles of SLE patients, which may provide a new avenue for the diagnosis and treatment of SLE.