Crosstalk between microglia and neural stem cells influences the relapse of glioblastoma in GBM immunological microenvironment.

Interactions between immunocytes and Neural Stem Cells (NSCs) in glioblastoma multiforme still remains unclear. Here, microglial cells and NSCs in peri-tumoral tissue were analyzed via single-cell whole-transcriptome sequencing. Results showed that two clusters of putative NSCs (the EGFRBCAN cell cluster, and the FABPTH19 cell cluster) exhibited immune-related functions. Two clusters of putative microglia (the XISTPDK4 and APOC1CCL3 cell clusters) exhibited the function of glial cell activation. The results of ligand receptor network analysis disclosed significant interactions between the APOC1CCL3 microglia and the NSCs. Correlation analysis on the overall survival (OS) and relapse-free survival (RFS) with 102 potential molecular targets in the TCGA database showed that a much larger number of molecules were correlated with RFS than with OS (34.31% vs. 8.82%), nine of them were validated in clinical specimens. In conclusion, crosstalk between APOC1CCL3 microglia and multiple molecule-labeled NSCs distal to the tumor core play certain roles on the recurrence of GBM.