Immune cells called T cells help the body fight infection.Credit: Dennis Kunkel Microscopy/SPL
The Cell Atlas describing the functions of immune cells in more than 400 Chinese individuals has revealed key differences in the biology of people from different populations.
The study published today in sciences1compiles a “multi-omic” atlas of immune cells in the blood. It collects data on genes, proteins, RNA and the epigenome to study how this group of cells functions. The atlas, called the Chinese Immunity Multi-omics Atlas (CIMA), finds important variation in immune cell functions, compared to those mapped in similar datasets from European and Japanese groups.
“By providing a dataset that complements other Asian groups such as the Japanese ImmuNexUT project, we have created a resource that allows the discovery of biological mechanisms and genetic associations that are likely to be missed in European-centric studies,” the authors wrote in a joint statement to nature.
Various data sets
Researchers have created multiple atlases of several cell types and used them to address specific questions related to the brain. Alzheimer’s disease illness and Immune system. But these atlases are often based primarily on data from people of European origin. This means that drugs designed based on the characteristics of cells in these atlases may not be effective in individuals with other origins.
Cell atlases unlock the secrets of the human body
To address this gap, Jianhua Yin At Shaanxi Medical University-Collaborative Center for Future Medicine in Taiyuan, China, he and his colleagues analyzed more than 10 million immune cells in blood samples from 428 healthy Chinese adults at multiple levels.
The atlas provides biomolecular markers for each individual, including metabolic profiles, blood biochemical markers, chromatin accessibility data and differences in gene expression across cell populations.
The researchers compared their data set to the study results OneK1K The project analyzed people of Northern European origins2 And the Japanese Immunixut project3. They found that the basic immune pathways and cell types are the same in different populations.
However, there were differences in gene organization and immune cell status between the atlases. When it comes to looking for variations near certain genes that affect how active a gene is, for example, the researchers found that more than 93% of these targets in the CIMA data overlap with those in the Japanese group, but only about 44% of them overlap with the European group.
One example of variation is the rs11886530 gene variant, which is common in East Asian populations but rare in Europeans. In the CIMA data, this allele was found to regulate circadian clock genes NPAS2 and NR1D1 In immune cells called T cells. According to the authors, this mechanism has not been observed before in immune cells.
“I think the atlas is a clinically important resource,” says Cai Chung, an immunologist at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine at Chapel Hill. “This could be useful for personalized medicine and also for investigating drug interactions that may be specific to a particular population.”
Age and gender differences
The group of people the authors studied ranged in age from 20 to 77 years, and included 189 men and 239 women, so there were enough participants to tease out age- and sex-related differences in immune cell behavior.
They found that increasing age is associated with having more white blood cells, which cause inflammation, and with changed gene expression in stem cells, which act as messengers in the immune system.