Single-Cell Analysis Reveals That CD47 mRNA Expression Correlates with Immune Cell Activation, Antiviral Isgs, and Cytotoxicity

Abstract

Background/aims: Immune cells are reported to upregulate CD47 during infection, however, the role of CD47 in innate and adaptive immune cells remains unclear.

Methods: To bridge this knowledge gap, we analysed our single cell (sc)-RNA dataset along with other publicly available sc-RNA datasets from healthy controls, people with HIV-1 (PWH) and COVID-19 patients. We characterized each immune cell based on low, intermediate, and high expression of CD47 .

Results: Our analyses revealed that CD47 ^high pDCs and monocytes exhibited relatively higher expression of IFN-α regulatory genes, antiviral interferon-stimulated genes (ISGs) and MHC-I associated genes compared to CD47 ^inter. and CD47 ^low cells. Furthermore, CD47 ^high NK and CD8+ T cells showed higher expression of antiviral ISGs, as well as genes encoding for cytotoxic markers like granzyme B, perforin, granulysin, interferon gamma and NKG7. Additionally, CD47 ^high CD8+ T cells expressed higher levels of PD-1 and LAG-3 genes. Lastly, we found that CD47 ^high B cells had enriched expression of genes involved in cell activation and humoral responses.

Conclusion: Overall, our analyses revealed that innate and adaptive immune cells expressing elevated activation and functional gene signatures also express higher CD47 levels.

Keywords: CD47 ; Immune cells ; Transcriptomic ; Infection ; Antiviral ; Cytotoxic.