Single Cell Immune Profiling for SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) Research
Single-cell Immune Profiling Accelerates Antibody Discovery, Vaccine and Immunotherapy Development.
Single cell immune profiling is a critical approach to study immune repertoires of thousands of immune cells, elucidate the key anti-virus adaptive immune responses, and explore potential immunomodulatory therapeutic strategies. As a flexible partner in the single cell multiomics services, Creative Biolabs aspires to provide the most comprehensive immune profiling services, including but not limited to analyses of cellular context, diversity, antigen specificity, immune cell subpopulations, BCR/TCR sequences, and TCR-MHC specificity. We are committed to advancing your immune profiling program with our single cell solutions and reducing the overall development timeline for our clients.
Importance of Single-cell Immune Profiling
The immune system encompasses a large degree of phenotypic diversity and plasticity in its cell types, especially when encountering virus infection. Advances in single-cell technologies, i.e., single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq), have allowed for comprehensive profiling of the immune system. Single cell immune profiling can be used to:
- Characterize the immune system heterogeneity by identifying novel distinct immune cell subsets in health and disease;
- Measure the receptors (BCR/TCR) expressed by immune cells to identify stage-specific pathogen antigens together with immune subpopulations to promote the control of infection;
- Characterize stochastic heterogeneity within a cell population;
- Build developmental trajectories for immune cells.
Fig.1 Single-cell immune profiling workflow. (Higdon, 2019)
Single-cell Immune Profiling Services for SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19)
To better understand the relationship between the new SARS-CoV-2 virus and the adaptive immune response, we offer comprehensive single cell immune profiling services (10X technologies and others) to bring critical insights into the immune clearance mechanism and new therapeutic strategy for COVID-19.
- Single-cell transcriptome sequencing (scRNA-seq)
- Single-cell TCR sequencing (scTCR-seq)
- Single-cell BCR sequencing (scBCR-seq)
scRNA-seq is a powerful method for dissecting the cell-type composition of a heterogeneous population. scRNA-seq has been used to examine the cellular context of the adaptive immune response, to analyze new immune cell subpopulations, to explore potential cell surface markers and antigen specificity, to study dynamic interactions between lymphocytes and target cells, etc.
scTCR-seq provides V(D)J gene sequences, paired α- and β-chain information, enabling identification of which TCR binds to a particular antigen. TCR sequencing to map the distribution, clonal expansion, migration, and developmental transitions of sorted T cells. Analysis of TCR repertoire data is an important element in trying to understand the role of TCR diversity in immune responses.
scBCR-seq also provides a wealth of information on the nature of an immune response, such as V(D)J gene sequences, paired α- and β-chain information, etc. In addition, scBCR-seq has the ability to measure somatic hypermutation through an additional lineage reconstruction step to account for somatic hypermutation events at the B cell receptor (BCR) locus.
Through our single cell immune profiling platform, you can profile the circulating immune cells in COVID-19 patients during the active disease and recovery stages via single cell RNA, TCR, and BCR sequencing to have a deeper understanding about the T and B cell diversity, V(D)J recombination, and immune repertoires changes during SARS-CoV-2 infection. Our data also help you to assess antibody specificity for known or putative antigens, map BCR sequences to antigen specificity, identify antigen-specific immune responses to vaccine, find neutralizing antibodies from patients, and explore potential immunomodulatory therapeutic strategies.
If you have additional requirements or questions, please feel free to contact us.
References
- Higdon, L.E.; et al. Single cell immune profiling in transplantation research. American Journal of Transplantation. 2019, 19(5): 1278-1287.
- Wen, Wen.; et al. Immune Cell Profiling of COVID-19 Patients in the recovery stage by Single-cell sequencing. medRxiv 2020.
- Huang, Lulin.; et al. Blood single cell immune profiling reveals the interferon-MAPK pathway mediated adaptive immune response for COVID-19. medRxiv 2020.
