The First Reconstruction of Intercellular Interaction Network in Mus musculus Immune System

Intercellular interactions play an important role in regulating communications of cells with each other. So far, many studies have been done with both experimental and computational approaches in this field. Therefore, in order to investigate and analyze the intercellular interactions, use of network reconstruction has attracted the attention of many researchers recently. The intercellular interaction network was reconstructed using receptor and ligand interaction dataset and gene expression data of the first phase of the immunological genome project. In the reconstructed network, there are 9271 communications between 162 cells which were created through 460 receptor-ligand interactions. The results indicate that cells of hematopoietic lineages use fewer communication pathways for interacting with each other and the most network communications belong to non-hematopoietic stromal cells and macrophages. The results indicated the importance of the communication of stromal cells with immune cells and also high specificity of genes expression in these cells. The stromal cells have the most autocrine communication, and interactions between the wnt5a with the Ror1/2 and Fzd5a among the stromal lineage cells are abundant.