COVID-19 immune features revealed by a large-scale single-cell transcriptome atlas

By Xianwen Ren, Wen Wen, Xiaoying Fan, Wenhong Hou, B. Su, Pengfei Cai, Jiesheng Li, Yang Liu, F. Tang, Fan Zhang and 80 more. Cell, 2021

783 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Infectious Diseases, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1ff343b70563a4f1d6d411d1cc1f9666aea98fc2

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In Molecular Biology

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Citations in the corpus

• Multiple early factors anticipate post-acute COVID-19 sequelae (2022, positive): “33 datasets based on previous cell type annotation (Ren et al., 2021; Stephenson et al., 2021).”