Integrative Analysis of Spatial Transcriptome with Single-cell Transcriptome and Single-cell Epigenome in Mouse Lungs after Immunization

Abstract

Immunological memory is key to productive adaptive immunity. An unbiased, high throughput gene expression profiling of tissue-resident memory T cells at their precise anatomical locations within the lung is fundamental to understanding lung immunity, but such spatial information has yet to be characterized. In this study, using a well-established Klebsiella pneumoniae infection model, we performed an integrative analysis of spatial transcriptome with single-cell RNA-seq and single-cell ATAC-seq on lung cells from mice after immunization using the 10x Genomics Chromium and Visium platform. We employed several deconvolution algorithms and established an optimized deconvolution pipeline to accurately decipher specific cell-type composition by anatomic location. We identified and located 12 major cell types by scRNA-seq and spatial transcriptomic analysis. Integrating scATAC-seq data from the same cells processed in parallel with scRNA-seq, we found epigenomic profiles provide more robust cell type identification, especially for lineage-specific T helper cells. When combining all three data modalities, we observed a dynamic change in the location of T helper cells as well as their corresponding chemokines for chemotaxis. Furthermore, cell-cell communication analysis of spatial transcriptome provided evidence of lineage-specific T helper cells receiving designated cytokine signaling. In summary, our first-in-class study demonstrated the power of multi-omics analysis to uncover intrinsic spatial- and cell-type-dependent molecular mechanisms of lung immunity. Our data provides a rich research resource of single cell multi-omics data as a reference for understanding spatial dynamics of lung immunization.