Background
Heterogeneity is one of the most important characteristic of tumors. However, the current researches are focused on cancer cells of a certain tissue, which have revealed a complex and diverse state of cancer cells. But these studies ignored a key factor that is the complex cell ecosystem composed of tumor-related stromal cells and immune microenvironment may itself be a heterogeneous complex system like cancer cells. So the authors used single-cell transcriptome sequencing technology to analyze the microenvironment of stromal cells in lung cancer.
Protocol
In this experiment, specimens of tumors and adjacent non-malignant tissues were taken from the lesions of five lung cancer patients, which are separated and labeled as tumor core samples, tumor intermediate samples, tumor marginal samples, and normal tissues adjacent to cancer. The samples were then sequenced using single-cell transcriptome sequencing technology of 10x Genomics. Finally, perform cell cluster analysis and survival analysis. (The platform process uses only two of the samples for testing.)
Result
The authors analyzed 52,698 cells collected and identified 52 subtypes of stromal cells, including new cell subgroups that are considered to be homogeneous, as well as their heterogeneous transcription factors. By comparing with tissue sequencing data, it was found that the marker genes of lung cancer and the related mechanism of survival, as well as its immune response, etc.
Reference
Lambrechts, Diether, et al. "Phenotype molding of stromal cells in the lung tumor microenvironment." Nature medicine 24.8 (2018): 1277-1289.
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