Science:推翻常规认知! 科学家发现树突细胞或许源于特殊祖细胞

Mapping the human DC lineage through the integration of high-dimensional techniques

树突细胞是机体免疫力的”门卫”，其能够帮助机体有效检测并且开启抵御外来病原体或异物的免疫力，截止到目前为止，研究者认为树突细胞的亚型是从一种共同的祖细胞分化而来；近日，一项刊登在国际杂志science上的研究报告中，来自新加坡ASTAR研究所等机构的研究人员通过研究发现，人类机体的免疫细胞或许是从特殊的祖细胞衍生而来，相关研究或为后期开发新型疫苗并且优化疫苗提供了新的线索。

Dendritic cells (DC) are professional antigen-presenting cells that orchestrate immune responses. The human DC population comprises two main functionally specialized lineages, whose origins and differentiation pathways remain incompletely defined. Here, we combine two high-dimensional technologies—single-cell messenger RNA sequencing (scmRNAseq) and cytometry by time-of-flight (CyTOF)—to identify human blood CD123+CD33+CD45RA+ DC precursors (pre-DC). Pre-DC share surface markers with plasmacytoid DC (pDC) but have distinct functional properties that were previously attributed to pDC. Tracing the differentiation of DC from the bone marrow to the peripheral blood revealed that the pre-DC compartment contains distinct lineage-committed subpopulations, including one early uncommitted CD123high pre-DC subset and two CD45RA+CD123low lineage-committed subsets exhibiting functional differences. The discovery of multiple committed pre-DC populations opens promising new avenues for the therapeutic exploitation of DC subset-specific targeting.