Single cell RNA sequencing of human liver reveals distinct intrahepatic macrophage populations

By S. Macparland, Jeffrey C. Liu, Xuezhong Ma, Brendan T. Innes, Agata M Bartczak, B. K. Gage, J. Manuel, Nicholas Khuu, Juan Echeverri, I. Linares and 23 more. Nature Communications, 2018

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The liver is the largest solid organ in the body and is critical for metabolic and immune functions. However, little is known about the cells that make up the human liver and its immune microenvironment. Here we report a map of the cellular landscape of the human liver using single-cell RNA sequencing. We provide the transcriptional profiles of 8444 parenchymal and non-parenchymal cells obtained from the fractionation of fresh hepatic tissue from five human livers. Using gene expression patterns, flow cytometry, and immunohistochemical examinations, we identify 20 discrete cell populations of hepatocytes, endothelial cells, cholangiocytes, hepatic stellate cells, B cells, conventional and non-conventional T cells, NK-like cells, and distinct intrahepatic monocyte/macrophage populations. Together, our study presents a comprehensive view of the human liver at single-cell resolution that outlines the characteristics of resident cells in the liver, and in particular provides a map of the human hepatic immune microenvironment. The development of single cell RNA sequencing technologies has been instrumental in advancing our understanding of tissue biology. Here, MacParland et al. performed single cell RNA sequencing of human liver samples, and identify distinct populations of intrahepatic macrophages that may play specific roles in liver disease.

Subfields: Immunology, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7e4f67c856114989d32761e592c8b95e47ce2376

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Citations in the corpus

Severe COVID-19 Is Marked by a Dysregulated Myeloid Cell Compartment (2020, neutral): “In contrast, in severe COVID-19, monocytes showed low expression of HLADR, and high levels of MAFB, PLBD1, and CD163, all of which are associated with anti-inflammatory macrophage functions (Bronte et al., 2016; Cuevas et al., 2017; Fischer-Riepe et al., 2020; MacParland et al., 2018).”
DNA methylation aging clocks: challenges and recommendations (2019, background): “While cell isolation techniques may enable robust and insightful studies due to larger sample sizes, their level of resolution may be limited by the methodologies employed and current knowledge of cell categorization [183].”