Single cell RNA-sequencing based characterization of cell compositions in human multiple primary lung cancer

Multiple primary lung cancers (MPLC) pose diagnostic and therapeutic challenges in the clinic. Here, we orchestrated the cellular atlasof MPLC by single cell RNA-sequencing and identified the heterogeneity between different lesions within the same MPLC patients. We collected 19 tissue samples from four MPLC patients (one squamous carcinoma and three adenocarcinomas); each patient had two separate lung tumor lesions.For the first two patients (P1 and P2), we collected one tissue specimen from each of the tumor lesions. For the third patient (P3), to understand the intra-lesion heterogeneity, two repetitive tissue specimens from each of the tumor lesions were collected. For the last patient (P4), two tissue specimens from one of the larger tumor lesions and one tissue specimen from the other small tumor lesion were collected.As comparisons, one normal tissue sample adjacent to each tumor lesion was collected. Single cell RNA-sequencing was performed on all the collected 19 samples.