Spatially visualized single-cell pathology of highly multiplexed protein profiles in health and disease

Mayar Allam; Thomas Hu; Shuangyi Cai; Krishnan Laxminarayanan; Robert B Hughley; Ahmet F Coskun

doi:10.1038/s42003-021-02166-2

Spatially visualized single-cell pathology of highly multiplexed protein profiles in health and disease

Commun Biol. 2021 May 27;4(1):632. doi: 10.1038/s42003-021-02166-2.

Authors

Mayar Allam^#¹, Thomas Hu^#^{1

2}, Shuangyi Cai¹, Krishnan Laxminarayanan³, Robert B Hughley³, Ahmet F Coskun^{4

5

6}

Affiliations

¹ Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA.
² School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA.
³ Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA.
⁴ Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA. ahmet.coskun@bme.gatech.edu.
⁵ Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA. ahmet.coskun@bme.gatech.edu.
⁶ Interdisciplinary Bioengineering Graduate Program, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA. ahmet.coskun@bme.gatech.edu.

^# Contributed equally.

Abstract

Deep molecular profiling of biological tissues is an indicator of health and disease. We used imaging mass cytometry (IMC) to acquire spatially resolved 20-plex protein data in tissue sections from normal and chronic tonsillitis cases. We present SpatialViz, a suite of algorithms to explore spatial relationships in multiplexed tissue images by visualizing and quantifying single-cell granularity and anatomical complexity in diverse multiplexed tissue imaging data. Single-cell and spatial maps confirmed that CD68+ cells were correlated with the enhanced Granzyme B expression and CD3+ cells exhibited enrichment of CD4+ phenotype in chronic tonsillitis. SpatialViz revealed morphological distributions of cellular organizations in distinct anatomical areas, spatially resolved single-cell associations across anatomical categories, and distance maps between the markers. Spatial topographic maps showed the unique organization of different tissue layers. The spatial reference framework generated network-based comparisons of multiplex data from healthy and diseased tonsils. SpatialViz is broadly applicable to multiplexed tissue biology.

Publication types

Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural
Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Algorithms
Humans
Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / methods*
Proteomics / methods
Single-Cell Analysis / methods*
Spatio-Temporal Analysis
Tonsillitis / metabolism
Tonsillitis / physiopathology*

Grants and funding

K25 AI140783/AI/NIAID NIH HHS/United States