Abstract
The blood and immune system are characterised by utmost diversity in its cellular components. This heterogeneity can solely be resolved with the application of single-cell technologies that enable precise examination of cell-to-cell variation. Single-cell transcriptomics is continuously pushing forward our understanding of processes driving haematopoiesis and immune responses in physiological settings as well as in disease. Remarkably, in the last five years, a number of studies involving single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) allowed the discovery of new immune cell types and revealed that haematopoiesis is a continuous rather than a stepwise process, thus challenging the classical haematopoietic lineage tree model. This review summarises the most recent studies which applied scRNA-seq to answer outstanding questions in the fields of haematology and immunology and discusses the present challenges and future directions.
Highlights
Until the last decade, blood and immune cells were characterised by researchers using a ‘bulk’ approach, which involves studying a cell type at the population level while considering the average measure of a particular parameter in a population as representative of all the individual cells
The authors declare that there are no competing interests associated with the manuscript
BCR, B-cell receptor; HCC, hepatocellular carcinoma; HSC, haematopoietic stem cell; HSPCs, haematopoietic stem and progenitor cells; ILC, innate lymphoid cell; MARS-seq, massively parallel single cell RNA sequencing; MDSC, myeloid-derived suppressor cell; NK cell, natural killer cell; scRNA-seq, single-cell RNA sequencing; STRT-seq, single-cell tagged reverse transcription sequencing; TCR, T-cell receptor; Treg, T regulatory cell
Summary
Blood and immune cells were characterised by researchers using a ‘bulk’ approach, which involves studying a cell type at the population level while considering the average measure of a particular parameter in a population as representative of all the individual cells.
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