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DEEP PROFILING

Elucidating the molecular circuitry of autoimmunity

Nature Immunology volume 20, pages 777–778 (2019)Cite this article

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Novel single-cell profiling technologies have delineated the cellular and molecular landscapes that dominate the joints in rheumatoid arthritis and the skin and kidneys in systemic lupus erythematosus, shedding light on potential pathogenic mechanisms.

Flow cytometry has long served as the standard for high-throughput investigation of cellular suspensions and enables the identification of cell types by immunofluorescence labeling. Flow cytometry can process thousands of cells per second, but the number of unique proteins that are detectable is generally only ~10–20 per experiment. The development of mass cytometry that utilizes immuno–mass labeling has increased the number of unique proteins detected to ~30–50 per experiment4. Due to the combinatorial nature of protein expression, that increase, in turn, has led to much deeper profiling of cell types. In parallel, the development of next-generation sequencing has facilitated large-scale sequencing, and with the aid of sufficient amplification it is possible to estimate the abundance of mRNA molecules at the single-cell level5. Since there is usually a positive correlation between transcript abundance and protein expression, at least for differentially expressed genes, the single-cell RNA-sequencing (RNA-seq) data can be used to directly infer the expression of differentially expressed proteins and create atlases of cells that constitute the different anatomical compartments.

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Fig. 1: Harnessing the power of single-cell profiling to study end-organ inflammation.

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  1. College of Engineering, University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA

    Navin Varadarajan & Chandra Mohan

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  1. Navin Varadarajan
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  2. Chandra Mohan
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Correspondence to Navin Varadarajan or Chandra Mohan.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Varadarajan, N., Mohan, C. Elucidating the molecular circuitry of autoimmunity. Nat Immunol 20, 777–778 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41590-019-0436-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41590-019-0436-8

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