Immune cell profiling of COVID-19 patients in the recovery stage by single-cell sequencing
Wen Wen, Wenru Su, Hao Tang, Wenqing Le, Xiaopeng Zhang, Yingfeng Zheng, Xiuxing Liu, Lihui Xie, Jianmin Li, Jinguo Ye, Liwei Dong, Xiuliang Cui, Yushan Miao, Depeng Wang, Jiantao Dong, Chuanle Xiao, Wei Chen & Hongyang Wang
Cell Discovery volume 6, Article number: 31 (2020)
Abstract
COVID-19, caused by SARS-CoV-2, has recently affected over 1,200,000 people and killed more than 60,000. The key immune cell subsets change and their states during the course of COVID-19 remain unclear. We sought to comprehensively characterize the transcriptional changes in peripheral blood mononuclear cells during the recovery stage of COVID-19 by single-cell RNA sequencing technique. It was found that T cells decreased remarkably, whereas monocytes increased in patients in the early recovery stage (ERS) of COVID-19. There was an increased ratio of classical CD14++ monocytes with high inflammatory gene expression as well as a greater abundance of CD14++IL1β+ monocytes in the ERS. CD4+ T cells and CD8+ T cells decreased significantly and expressed high levels of inflammatory genes in the ERS.