Single cell sequencing of murine CD4+ T cells from atherosclerotic aortas

We report the single cell transcriptome of CD4+ T cells from atherosclerotic aortas from ApoE-deficient mice that have been fed a western diet (WD) with aggravated atherosclerosis or with a standard chow diet (CD) with moderate atherosclerosis. We show that aortic T cells have a unique transcriptome with a mixed phenotype overlapping with T-regulatory and pathogenic T-helper type -1 and -17 cells. Overall design: Leukocytes from atherosclerotic aortas were extracted by enzymatic digestion and flow sorting of viable CD45+ leukocytes. Leukocytes underwent single cell sequencing by the 10x Genomics drop-sequencing workflow. CD4+ T cells were identified by marker gene expression in computational down-stream analysis and T cell heterogeneity and gene expression was revealed by dimensionality reduction and unsupervised cluster detection.