Multi-omic analyses in immune cell development with lessons learned from T cell development

Abstract

Traditionally, flow cytometry has been the preferred method to characterize immune cells at the single-cell level. Flow cytometry is used in immunology mostly to measure the expression of identifying markers on the cell surface, but-with good antibodies-can also be used to assess the expression of intracellular proteins. The advent of single-cell RNA-sequencing has paved the road to study immune development at an unprecedented resolution. Single-cell RNA-sequencing studies have not only allowed us to efficiently chart the make-up of heterogeneous tissues, including their most rare cell populations, it also increasingly contributes to our understanding how different omics modalities interplay at a single cell resolution. Particularly for investigating the immune system, this means that these single-cell techniques can be integrated to combine and correlate RNA and protein data at the single-cell level. While RNA data usually reveals a large heterogeneity of a given population identified solely by a combination of surface protein markers, the integration of different omics modalities at a single cell resolution is expected to greatly contribute to our understanding of the immune system.

Keywords: T cells; multi‐omics; scRNA‐seq; spectral flow cytometry; thymus.