Centre de recherche, Institut de cardiologie de Montréal, Montréal, Québec, Canada.
Unité de recherche en ingénierie des ARN, Institut de recherche en immunologie et en cancérologie, Montréal, Québec, Canada.
PLoS One. 2020 May 29;15(5):e0233543. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0233543. eCollection 2020.
Genome-wide transcriptomic analyses have provided valuable insight into fundamental biology and disease pathophysiology. Many studies have taken advantage of the correlation in the expression patterns of the transcriptome to infer a potential biologic function of uncharacterized genes, and multiple groups have examined the relationship between co-expression, co-regulation, and gene function on a broader scale. Given the unique characteristics of immune cells circulating in the blood, we were interested in determining whether it was possible to identify functional co-expression modules in human immune cells. Specifically, we sequenced the transcriptome of nine immune cell types from peripheral blood cells of healthy donors and, using a combination of global and targeted analyses of genes within co-expression modules, we were able to determine functions for these modules that were cell lineage-specific or shared among multiple cell lineages. In addition, our analyses identified transcription factors likely important for immune cell lineage commitment and/or maintenance.
全基因组转录组分析为基础生物学和疾病病理生理学提供了有价值的见解。许多研究利用转录组表达模式的相关性来推断未被描述基因的潜在生物学功能，并且多个研究小组已经在更大范围内研究了共表达、共调控和基因功能之间的关系。鉴于循环在血液中的免疫细胞的独特特征，我们感兴趣的是确定是否有可能鉴定人类免疫细胞中的功能共表达模块。具体来说，我们对来自健康供体外周血细胞的九种免疫细胞类型进行了转录组测序，并且通过对共表达模块内基因的全局和靶向分析相结合，我们能够确定这些模块的功能是细胞谱系特异性的，还是在多个细胞谱系中共享的。此外，我们的分析还鉴定了可能对免疫细胞谱系分化和/或维持重要的转录因子。
