Konnikova lab placental villi immune cell atlas

This placental villi immune cell atlasis from a case-control study of 32 placentas, all of which were cryopreserved within 12 hours of Caesarean delivery. Placenta samples were assigned to one of four study cohorts: healthy term cases (mean gestational age, GA = 39.1 weeks), cases delivered preterm for maternal indications (structural complications) without inflammatory etiologies (mean GA = 35.5 weeks), cases of twins delivered preterm for fetal indications (transfusion syndromes) (mean GA = 32.7 weeks), and idiopathic preterm cases with diverse inflammatory pathologies (mean GA = 28.8 weeks). After thoroughly discarding maternal decidua tissue and collecting core placental villi just beneath the fetal membranes, tissues viably cryopreserved and then batched thawed where live immune cells were enriched from all samples and profiled by single cell transcriptomics. A subset of cases (N=28) was also evaluated using single nuclei sequencing in parallel from both placental villi and decidua basalis to capture cell types less amenable to live isolation (e.g. trophoblasts). Matched maternal blood (MB) and umbilical cord blood (CB) were also collected from two term dyads in order to provide sources of bona fide maternal and fetal immune cells, respectively. We sequenced each dyad separately, integrated all the data (>250,000 cells in total), and annotated cell clusters using a combination of canonical marker genes and de novo marker genes that emerged from this dataset using differential expression analysis. www.konnikovalab.com