COVID-19 Immune Features Revealed by a Large-scale Single-cell Transcriptome Atlas

Overview

Journal Cell

Publisher Cell Press

Specialty Cell Biology

Date 2021 Mar 3

PMID 33657410

Citations 365

Authors

Xianwen Ren

Wen Wen

Xiaoying Fan

Wenhong Hou

Bin Su

Pengfei Cai

Jiesheng Li

Yang Liu

Fei Tang

Fan Zhang

Yu Yang

Jiangping He

Wenji Ma

Jingjing He

Pingping Wang

Qiqi Cao

Fangjin Chen

Yuqing Chen

Xuelian Cheng

Guohong Deng

Xilong Deng

Wenyu Ding

Yingmei Feng

Rui Gan

Chuang Guo

Weiqiang Guo

Shuai He

Chen Jiang

Juanran Liang

Yi-Min Li

Jun Lin

Yun Ling

Haofei Liu

Jianwei Liu

Nianping Liu

Shu-Qiang Liu

Meng Luo

Qiang Ma

Qibing Song

Wujianan Sun

Gaoxiang Wang

Feng Wang

Ying Wang

Xiaofeng Wen

Qian Wu

Gang Xu

Xiaowei Xie

Xinxin Xiong

Xudong Xing

Hao Xu

Chonghai Yin

Dongdong Yu

Kezhuo Yu

Jin Yuan

Biao Zhang

Peipei Zhang

Tong Zhang

Jincun Zhao

Peidong Zhao

Jianfeng Zhou

Wei Zhou

Sujuan Zhong

Xiaosong Zhong

Shuye Zhang

Lin Zhu

Ping Zhu

Bin Zou

Jiahua Zou

Zengtao Zuo

Fan Bai

Xi Huang

Penghui Zhou

Qinghua Jiang

Zhiwei Huang

Jin-Xin Bei

Lai Wei

Xiu-Wu Bian

Xindong Liu

Tao Cheng

Xiangpan Li

Pingsen Zhao

Fu-Sheng Wang

Hongyang Wang

Bing Su

Zheng Zhang

Kun Qu

Xiaoqun Wang

Jiekai Chen

Ronghua Jin

Zemin Zhang

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

A dysfunctional immune response in coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) patients is a recurrent theme impacting symptoms and mortality, yet a detailed understanding of pertinent immune cells is not complete. We applied single-cell RNA sequencing to 284 samples from 196 COVID-19 patients and controls and created a comprehensive immune landscape with 1.46 million cells. The large dataset enabled us to identify that different peripheral immune subtype changes are associated with distinct clinical features, including age, sex, severity, and disease stages of COVID-19. Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) RNA was found in diverse epithelial and immune cell types, accompanied by dramatic transcriptomic changes within virus-positive cells. Systemic upregulation of S100A8/A9, mainly by megakaryocytes and monocytes in the peripheral blood, may contribute to the cytokine storms frequently observed in severe patients. Our data provide a rich resource for understanding the pathogenesis of and developing effective therapeutic strategies for COVID-19.

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