Single-cell RNA sequencing atlas of peripheral blood mononuclear cells from subjects with coronary artery disease

Abstract

Background: The landscape of specific peripheral circulating immune cell subsets at the single-cell level in the occurrence and development of coronary artery disease (CAD) remains poorly understood.

Methods: We conducted single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) of peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) from subjects with CAD (n = 3), and controls (n = 3), as well as downstream analysis including cell- and gene-level approaches. This explored the characteristics of peripheral circulating immune cells between CADs and controls by means of Uniform manifold approximation and projection (UMAP), Monocle3 package, CellPhoneDB, and single-cell regulatory network inference and clustering (SCENIC). PBMCs were used as clinical samples for validating our findings by qRT-PCR.

Results: We identified 33 cell clusters among 67,447 cells, including monocytes, T cells, B cells, NK cells, and platelets. The significant difference in the abundance of the 33 clusters of cell type between CADs group and controls group was not found. The JUN was shared in cluster 0, 11,13, and 24 from differential expression genes analysis and SCENIC analysis in monocyte clusters between CAD and controls. Besides, JUN was validated to be significantly upregulated in the CAD group (p = 0.018) and may act as a potential diagnostic biomarker and independent predictor of CAD.

Conclusions: Our study offered a detailed profiling of single-cell RNA sequencing of PBMCs from subjects with CADs and controls. These data provide a line of evidence that the JUN signaling pathway may be a potential diagnostic and therapeutic molecule target for CAD.

Keywords: Coronary artery disease; JUN signaling pathway; Peripheral blood mononuclear cells; Single-cell RNA-seq.