Chaudhry Farhan, Isherwood Jenna, Bawa Tejeshwar, Patel Dhruvil, Gurdziel Katherine, Lanfear David E, Ruden Douglas M, Levy Phillip D
Department of Emergency Medicine and Integrative Biosciences Center, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, United States.
Center for Molecular Medicine and Genetics, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, United States.
Front Cardiovasc Med. 2019 Dec 10;6:173. doi: 10.3389/fcvm.2019.00173. eCollection 2019.
Cardiovascular disease encompasses a wide range of conditions, resulting in the highest number of deaths worldwide. The underlying pathologies surrounding cardiovascular disease include a vast and complicated network of both cellular and molecular mechanisms. Unique phenotypic alterations in specific cell types, visualized as varying RNA expression-levels (both coding and non-coding), have been identified as crucial factors in the pathology underlying conditions such as heart failure and atherosclerosis. Recent advances in single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) have elucidated a new realm of cell subpopulations and transcriptional variations that are associated with normal and pathological physiology in a wide variety of diseases. This breakthrough in the phenotypical understanding of our cells has brought novel insight into cardiovascular basic science. scRNA-seq allows for separation of widely distinct cell subpopulations which were, until recently, simply averaged together with bulk-tissue RNA-seq. scRNA-seq has been used to identify novel cell types in the heart and vasculature that could be implicated in a variety of disease pathologies. Furthermore, scRNA-seq has been able to identify significant heterogeneity of phenotypes within individual cell subtype populations. The ability to characterize single cells based on transcriptional phenotypes allows researchers the ability to map development of cells and identify changes in specific subpopulations due to diseases at a very high throughput. This review looks at recent scRNA-seq studies of various aspects of the cardiovascular system and discusses their potential value to our understanding of the cardiovascular system and pathology.
心血管疾病涵盖多种病症，是全球死亡人数最多的原因。心血管疾病背后的病理包括庞大而复杂的细胞和分子机制网络。特定细胞类型中独特的表型改变，表现为不同的RNA表达水平（包括编码和非编码），已被确定为心力衰竭和动脉粥样硬化等病症病理的关键因素。单细胞RNA测序（scRNA-seq）的最新进展揭示了一个新的细胞亚群和转录变异领域，这些与多种疾病的正常和病理生理学相关。我们对细胞表型理解的这一突破为心血管基础科学带来了新的见解。scRNA-seq能够分离出差异很大的细胞亚群，而直到最近，这些亚群在整体组织RNA测序中只是简单地进行平均处理。scRNA-seq已被用于识别心脏和血管中可能与多种疾病病理相关的新型细胞类型。此外，scRNA-seq能够识别单个细胞亚型群体内显著的表型异质性。基于转录表型对单个细胞进行表征的能力使研究人员能够绘制细胞发育图谱，并以非常高的通量识别特定亚群因疾病而发生的变化。本文综述了近期关于心血管系统各个方面的scRNA-seq研究，并讨论了它们对我们理解心血管系统和病理学的潜在价值。
