Tissue-specific imprinting and heterogeneity of natural killer cells and group 1 innate lymphoid cells

We report here the identification, by CITE-seq and scRNA-seq, of distinct NK cells, ILC1s and intermediate subsets across 4 tissues at steady state. We found that unlike NK cells, which had a signature well conserved between organs, ILC1s exhibited a great heterogeneity depending on the tissue microenvironment, at both the phenotypic and transcriptomic levels. Finally, we performed a multidimensional comparison of these cells across tissues and identified sets of genes expressed by each related subsets. Overall design: Single-cell RNA sequencing of murine sorted CD45+ Lin– NKp46+ NK1.1+ cells from small intestine lamina propria, liver, salivary gland and spleen using 10x Genomics.本研究通过单细胞RNA测序（single-cell RNA sequencing, scRNA-seq）与CITE-seq（CITE-seq），在稳态条件下的4种组织中鉴定出不同的自然杀伤细胞（natural killer cells, NK cells）、1型固有淋巴细胞（innate lymphoid cell type 1, ILC1s）及中间亚群。研究发现，与器官间特征高度保守的NK细胞不同，ILC1s在表型与转录组层面均表现出显著的组织微环境依赖性异质性。最后，本研究对跨组织的上述细胞进行了多维度比较，并鉴定出各相关亚群所表达的基因集。实验整体设计：采用10x Genomics平台，对从小肠固有层、肝脏、唾液腺与脾脏中分选得到的小鼠源CD45+ Lin⁻ NKp46+ NK1.1+ 细胞开展单细胞RNA测序。