Single-cell Reconstruction of the Early Maternal-fetal Interface in Humans

Overview

Journal Nature

Specialty Science

Date 2018 Nov 16

PMID 30429548

Citations 978

Authors

Roser Vento-Tormo

Mirjana Efremova

Rachel A Botting

Margherita Y Turco

Miquel Vento-Tormo

Kerstin B Meyer

Jong-Eun Park

Emily Stephenson

Krzysztof Polanski

Angela Goncalves

Lucy Gardner

Staffan Holmqvist

Johan Henriksson

Angela Zou

Andrew M Sharkey

Ben Millar

Barbara Innes

Laura Wood

Anna Wilbrey-Clark

Rebecca P Payne

Martin A Ivarsson

Steve Lisgo

Andrew Filby

David H Rowitch

Judith N Bulmer

Gavin J Wright

Michael J T Stubbington

Muzlifah Haniffa

Ashley Moffett

Sarah A Teichmann

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

During early human pregnancy the uterine mucosa transforms into the decidua, into which the fetal placenta implants and where placental trophoblast cells intermingle and communicate with maternal cells. Trophoblast-decidual interactions underlie common diseases of pregnancy, including pre-eclampsia and stillbirth. Here we profile the transcriptomes of about 70,000 single cells from first-trimester placentas with matched maternal blood and decidual cells. The cellular composition of human decidua reveals subsets of perivascular and stromal cells that are located in distinct decidual layers. There are three major subsets of decidual natural killer cells that have distinctive immunomodulatory and chemokine profiles. We develop a repository of ligand-receptor complexes and a statistical tool to predict the cell-type specificity of cell-cell communication via these molecular interactions. Our data identify many regulatory interactions that prevent harmful innate or adaptive immune responses in this environment. Our single-cell atlas of the maternal-fetal interface reveals the cellular organization of the decidua and placenta, and the interactions that are critical for placentation and reproductive success.

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