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XCI and sex-biased expression in AT2 cells

ABSTRACT: Significant sex differences exist for many lung pathologies, including SARS-CoV-2 related disease (COVID-19) and pulmonary fibrosis, but the mechanistic basis for this remains unclear. Notably, Ace2, the gene encoding angiotensin-converting enzyme 2, an enzyme that plays multiple roles in SARS-CoV-2 pathogenesis, including acting as the major viral receptor, is localized on the X-chromosome. Moreover, prior work in fibroblasts suggested that Ace2 may escape X-Chromosome Inactivation (XCI), which normalizes X-lined gene expression between sexes. Alveolar type 2 cells (AT2s), which play a key role in alveolar lung regeneration, express Ace2, suggesting that aberrant XCI in AT2s could potentially impact sex-biased lung pathology. To that end, we performed RNA-seq on AT2 cells isolated from 4 male and 4 female F1 mus/cast mice. Utilizing allele-specific transcriptomics, we demonstrate that about 50% of expressed X-linked genes in mouse AT2s, including Ace2, escape XCI, the highest levels reported to date. Moreover, we observe dramatic genome-wide expression differences between male and female AT2s, likely influencing both lung physiology and pathophysiologic responses. Taken together, these studies support a renewed focus on AT2s as potential contributor to sex-biased differences in lung disease.

ORGANISM(S): Mus musculus

PROVIDER: GSE203166 | GEO | 2023/01/16

REPOSITORIES: GEO

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Project description:The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has affected nearly 700 million and claimed more than 6 million lives. However, the large heterogeneity in disease susceptibility and severity of illness (SOI) remains poorly understood. A growing body of evidence suggests that alveolar epithelial cell type 2 (AT2), which constitute 10-15% of all alveolar cells and are critical for alveolar homeostasis, are the primary targets of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection and damage to AT2s may directly contribute to disease severity and poor prognosis in COVID-19 patients. Our in-vitro modeling of SARS-CoV-2 infection, in well-characterized, highly uniform, (r2 at 95% CI = 0.92 ± 0.03), induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) derived AT2s from 10 participants of our Mexican American Family Study, showed interindividual variability in infection susceptibility and the post-infection cellular viral load. To understand the underlying mechanism of the AT2’s capacity to regulate SARS-CoV-2 infection and cellular viral load, we performed a systematic characterization of the pre- and post-SARS-CoV-2 challenged AT2 transcriptomes. A total of 1,393 genes were found significantly (Oneway ANOVA FDR corrected p ≤ 0.05; FC abs ≥ 2.0) differentially expressed (DE) between pre- and post-SARS-CoV-2 infection-challenged AT2 and suggest significant upregulation of viral infection-related cellular innate immune response pathways (p-value ≤ 0.05; activation z-score ≥ 3.5), whilst the cholesterol and xenobiotic related metabolic pathways were significantly downregulated (p-value ≤ 0.05; activation z-score ≤ - 3.5). Interestingly, pre-infection expression of 238 DE genes showed a high correlation with the post-infection SARS-CoV-2 viral load (FDR corrected p-value ≤ 0.05, and r2-absolute ≥ 0.57). The 85 genes whose expression was negatively correlated with the viral load showed significant enrichment in viral recognition and cytokine-mediated innate immune GO biological processes (p-value range: 4.65x10-10 to 2.24x10-6). The 153 genes whose expression was positively correlated with the viral load showed significant enrichment in cholesterol homeostasis, extracellular matrix, and MAPK/ERK pathway-related GO biological processes (p-value range: 5.06x10-5 to 6.53x10-4). Overall, our results strongly suggest that AT2s pre-infection innate immunity and metabolic state affects their susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2 infection and viral load.

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XCI and sex-biased expression in AT2 cells

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