Project description:Classic dendritic cells (cDCs) play a central role in the immune system and consist of two major subsets: CD141+ cDC (cDC1) and CD1c+ cDC (cDC2). The pre-cDCs is the immediate precursors to both cDC subsets. Previous studies showed that there were two pre-committed pre-cDC subpopulations. However, the key molecular drivers of pre-commitment in human pre-cDCs were not investigated. To address this question, we performed both single cell and bulk RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) of two cDC subsets and pre-cDCs. We inferred a list of sixteen candidate master regulator transcriptional factors (TFs) that can indeed separate pre-cDCs into two sub-populations, with one close to cDC1 and the other close to cDC2. More importantly, these two pre-cDC sub-populations are correlated with ratio of IRF8 to IRF4 expression level more than their individual expression level. Our results suggest the concept that the ratio of antagonistic TFs and their competition determine cDC subset differentiation fate.
Project description:The transcriptome of primary isolated unstimulated murine splenic cDC from specific pathogen free (SPF) was compared to cDC from Germ Free (GF) and Interferon alpha/beta receptor 1 (Ifnar) knock out mice. Cells were isolated and sorted by flow cytometry to high purity. Total RNA was isolated using the RNeasy plus micro kit (Qiagen). Barcoded mRNA seq libraries were prepared from 100 ng of total RNA (RIN>8) using a NEBnext poly(A) mRNA Magnetic Isolation Module and NEBnext UltraII lib prep kit for Illumina (New England Biosciences) according to the manual. Single-end RNA sequencing (59nt) was performed on a HiSeq 2500 (Illumina). Barcoded RNA-seq libraries were onboard clustered using HiSeq® Rapid SR Cluster Kit v2 using 8pM and 59bps were sequenced on the Illumina HiSeq 2500 using HiSeq Rapid SBS Kit v2 (59 Cycle). The raw output data of the HiSeq was preprocessed according to the Illumina standard protocol.