Single-cell transcriptome analysis reveals effector CD8+ T cells may play an important role in residual chronic immune activation and inflammation in HIV-1 infected patients

Despite antiretroviral therapy (ART) suppressed viremia and reduced mortality in HIV-1 infected patients, residual chronic immune activation and inflammation in these patients can lead to an increased risk of non-communicable diseases, while the mechanism is still not clear. Harnessing scRNA-seq of PBMC of HIV-1 patients receiving ART and public avaialable scRNA-seq data, we found that the proportion of CD4+ T cells, CD8+ T cells, monocytes, and B cells showed variation in these patients. Through cluster analysis, it was found that effector CD8+ T cells were significantly decreased in HIV infected patients and lsATR, but increased in fsART, migration inhibitory factor (MIF) signaling was significantly increased in fsART. We used single-cell transcriptome sequencing (scRNA-seq) of peripheral blood mononuclear cells from 2 HIV-1 infected patients with virus fully suppressed, and analyzed the scRNA-seq data of 16 HIV-1 infected patients from public data