Single-cell transcriptomic analysis of blood T cells from healthy controls, MS patients and COVID-19 patients by 10X genomics

In order to better understand the functional properties of this type of cells under different circumstances, we integrated the single-cell RNA-seq data of peripheral blood CD8+ T cells from healthy subjects, MS patients and COVID-19 patients generated from the 10X Genomics platform using the Seurat package. KIR+CD8+ T cells from different conditions (healthy, MS, and COVID-19) formed a distinct cluster with high expression of effector genes (GZMB and PRF1) as well as KIR transcripts. These findings reveal the commonality of KIR+CD8+ T cells across physiological and diseased status as well as their uniqueness relative to other CD8+ T cells. Pan T cells were isolated from the blood of healthy subjects (N=4) and MS patients (N=6) and then subjected to scRNA-seq analysis by 10X genomics. 10X scRNA-seq data of blood CD8 T cells from COVID-19 patients (N=25) were acquired from ArrayExpress: E-MTAB-9357.