Technology development in biological research often aims to either increase the number of cellular features that can be surveyed simultaneously or enhance the resolution at which such observations ...are possible. For decades, flow cytometry has balanced these goals to fill a critical need by enabling the measurement of multiple features in single cells, commonly to examine complex or hierarchical cellular systems. Recently, a format for flow cytometry has been developed that leverages the precision of mass spectrometry. This fusion of the two technologies, termed mass cytometry, provides measurement of over 40 simultaneous cellular parameters at single-cell resolution, significantly augmenting the ability of cytometry to evaluate complex cellular systems and processes. In this Primer, we review the current state of mass cytometry, providing an overview of the instrumentation, its present capabilities, and methods of data analysis, as well as thoughts on future developments and applications.
This is a Primer on mass cytometry, an approach that combines the precision of mass spectrometry with the single-cell resolution of flow cytometry to enable a variety of high-throughput, multidimensional views of biological systems.
Tissue regeneration is an orchestrated progression of cells from an immature state to a mature one, conventionally represented as distinctive cell subsets. A continuum of transitional cell states ...exists between these discrete stages. We combine the depth of single-cell mass cytometry and an algorithm developed to leverage this continuum by aligning single cells of a given lineage onto a unified trajectory that accurately predicts the developmental path de novo. Applied to human B cell lymphopoiesis, the algorithm (termed Wanderlust) constructed trajectories spanning from hematopoietic stem cells through to naive B cells. This trajectory revealed nascent fractions of B cell progenitors and aligned them with developmentally cued regulatory signaling including IL-7/STAT5 and cellular events such as immunoglobulin rearrangement, highlighting checkpoints across which regulatory signals are rewired paralleling changes in cellular state. This study provides a comprehensive analysis of human B lymphopoiesis, laying a foundation to apply this approach to other tissues and “corrupted” developmental processes including cancer.
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•Wanderlust aligns single cells on a trajectory according to their developmental path•Mass cytometry plus Wanderlust infers path from HSCs to naive B cells•Trajectory identifies precursor B cell populations where rearrangement occurs•Discovery of coordination points dictating cell fate decisions
Combining single-cell mass cytometry data from a population of cells from human tissue with a new algorithm that leverages the single-cell data to order the cells along their developmental trajectory provides insight into B cell development and paves the for similar analyses in other tissues.
Cytotoxic CD8
+ T lymphocytes directly kill infected or aberrant cells and secrete proinflammatory cytokines. By using metal-labeled probes and mass spectrometric analysis (cytometry by ...time-of-flight, or CyTOF) of human CD8
+ T cells, we analyzed the expression of many more proteins than previously possible with fluorescent labels, including surface markers, cytokines, and antigen specificity with modified peptide-MHC tetramers. With 3-dimensional principal component analysis (3D-PCA) to display phenotypic diversity, we observed a relatively uniform pattern of variation in all subjects tested, highlighting the interrelatedness of previously described subsets and the continuous nature of CD8
+ T cell differentiation. These data also showed much greater complexity in the CD8
+ T cell compartment than previously appreciated, including a nearly combinatorial pattern of cytokine expression, with distinct niches occupied by virus-specific cells. This large degree of functional diversity even between cells with the same specificity gives CD8
+ T cells a remarkable degree of flexibility in responding to pathogens.
► T cell specificity, phenotype, and function can be assessed by mass spectrometry ► Principal component analysis revealed a common pattern of phenotypic progression ► Expression of cytokines by CD8
+ T cells showed large combinatorial diversity ► Viral-specific cells occupied distinct niches of phenotypic and functional diversity
Type I Interferons (IFNs) are important cytokines for innate immunity against viruses and cancer. Sixteen human type I IFN variants signal through the same cell-surface receptors, IFNAR1 and IFNAR2, ...yet they can evoke markedly different physiological effects. The crystal structures of two human type I IFN ternary signaling complexes containing IFNα2 and IFNω reveal recognition modes and heterotrimeric architectures that are unique among the cytokine receptor superfamily but conserved between different type I IFNs. Receptor-ligand cross-reactivity is enabled by conserved receptor-ligand “anchor points” interspersed among ligand-specific interactions that “tune” the relative IFN-binding affinities, in an apparent extracellular “ligand proofreading” mechanism that modulates biological activity. Functional differences between IFNs are linked to their respective receptor recognition chemistries, in concert with a ligand-induced conformational change in IFNAR1, that collectively control signal initiation and complex stability, ultimately regulating differential STAT phosphorylation profiles, receptor internalization rates, and downstream gene expression patterns.
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► The type I interferon receptor complex is a novel heterotrimeric architecture ► Type I interferons share a common docking mode for receptor binding ► Ligand discrimination occurs through distinct energetics of shared receptor contacts ► Differential IFN signaling is modulated by ligand recognition chemistries
Advances in single-cell mass cytometry have increasingly improved highly multidimensional characterization of immune cell heterogeneity. The immunoassay multiplexing capacity relies on monoclonal ...antibodies labeled with stable heavy-metal isotopes. To date, a variety of rare-earth elements and noble and post-transition metal isotopes have been used in mass cytometry; nevertheless, the methods used for antibody conjugation differ because of the individual metal coordination chemistries and distinct stabilities of various metal cations. Herein, we provide three optimized protocols for conjugating monoclonal IgG antibodies with 48 high-purity heavy-metal isotopes: (i) 38 isotopes of lanthanides, 2 isotopes of indium, and 1 isotope of yttrium; (ii) 6 isotopes of palladium; and (iii) 1 isotope of bismuth. Bifunctional chelating agents containing coordinative ligands of monomeric DOTA (1,4,7,10-tetraazacyclododecane-1,4,7,10-tetraacetic acid) or polymeric pentetic acid (DTPA) were used to stably sequester isotopic cations in aqueous solutions and were subsequently coupled to IgG antibodies using site-specific biorthogonal reactions. Furthermore, quantification methods based on antibody inherent absorption at 280 nm and on extrinsic absorption at 562 nm after staining with bicinchoninic acid (BCA) are reported to determine metal-isotope-tagged antibodies. In addition, a freeze-drying procedure to prepare palladium isotopic mass tags is described. To demonstrate the utility, experiments using six palladium-tagged CD45 antibodies for barcoding assays of live immune cells in cytometry by time-of-flight (CyTOF) are described. Conjugation of pure isotopes of lanthanides, indium, or yttrium takes ~3.5 h. Conjugation of bismuth takes ~4 h. Preparation of palladium mass tags takes ~8 h. Conjugation of pure isotopes of palladium takes ~2.5 h. Antibody titration takes ~4 h.
A highly multiplexed cytometric imaging approach, termed co-detection by indexing (CODEX), is used here to create multiplexed datasets of normal and lupus (MRL/lpr) murine spleens. CODEX iteratively ...visualizes antibody binding events using DNA barcodes, fluorescent dNTP analogs, and an in situ polymerization-based indexing procedure. An algorithmic pipeline for single-cell antigen quantification in tightly packed tissues was developed and used to overlay well-known morphological features with de novo characterization of lymphoid tissue architecture at a single-cell and cellular neighborhood levels. We observed an unexpected, profound impact of the cellular neighborhood on the expression of protein receptors on immune cells. By comparing normal murine spleen to spleens from animals with systemic autoimmune disease (MRL/lpr), extensive and previously uncharacterized splenic cell-interaction dynamics in the healthy versus diseased state was observed. The fidelity of multiplexed spatial cytometry demonstrated here allows for quantitative systemic characterization of tissue architecture in normal and clinically aberrant samples.
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•Autoimmunity analyzed by multiplexed DNA-tagged antibody staining (CODEX)•CODEX data reveal pairwise interactions and niches changing with disease•First tier of neighbors significantly impacts marker expression in the index cells•Changes in splenic morphology correlate with shifts in cell frequencies
A DNA barcoding-based imaging technique uses multiplexed tissue antigen staining to enable the characterization of cell types and dynamics in a model of autoimmune disease.
Neuroinflammation and neurodegeneration may represent two poles of brain pathology. Brain myeloid cells, particularly microglia, play key roles in these conditions. We employed single-cell mass ...cytometry (CyTOF) to compare myeloid cell populations in the experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE) model of multiple sclerosis, the R6/2 model of Huntington's disease (HD) and the mutant superoxide dismutase 1 (mSOD1) model of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). We identified three myeloid cell populations exclusive to the CNS and present in each disease model. Blood-derived monocytes comprised five populations and migrated to the brain in EAE, but not in HD and ALS models. Single-cell analysis resolved differences in signaling and cytokine production within similar myeloid populations in EAE compared to HD and ALS models. Moreover, these analyses highlighted α5 integrin on myeloid cells as a potential therapeutic target for neuroinflammation. Together, these findings illustrate how neuropathology may differ between inflammatory and degenerative brain disease.
Elucidation and examination of cellular subpopulations that display condition-specific behavior can play a critical contributory role in understanding disease mechanism, as well as provide a focal ...point for development of diagnostic criteria linking such a mechanism to clinical prognosis. Despite recent advancements in single-cell measurement technologies, the identification of relevant cell subsets through manual efforts remains standard practice. As new technologies such as mass cytometry increase the parameterization of single-cell measurements, the scalability and subjectivity inherent in manual analyses slows both analysis and progress. We therefore developed Citrus (cluster identification, characterization, and regression), a data-driven approach for the identification of stratifying subpopulations in multidimensional cytometry datasets. The methodology of Citrus is demonstrated through the identification of known and unexpected pathway responses in a dataset of stimulated peripheral blood mononuclear cells measured by mass cytometry. Additionally, the performance of Citrus is compared with that of existing methods through the analysis of several publicly available datasets. As the complexity of flow cytometry datasets continues to increase, methods such as Citrus will be needed to aid investigators in the performance of unbiased—and potentially more thorough—correlation-based mining and inspection of cell subsets nested within high-dimensional datasets.
Antitumoral immunity requires organized, spatially nuanced interactions between components of the immune tumor microenvironment (iTME). Understanding this coordinated behavior in effective versus ...ineffective tumor control will advance immunotherapies. We re-engineered co-detection by indexing (CODEX) for paraffin-embedded tissue microarrays, enabling simultaneous profiling of 140 tissue regions from 35 advanced-stage colorectal cancer (CRC) patients with 56 protein markers. We identified nine conserved, distinct cellular neighborhoods (CNs)—a collection of components characteristic of the CRC iTME. Enrichment of PD-1+CD4+ T cells only within a granulocyte CN positively correlated with survival in a high-risk patient subset. Coupling of tumor and immune CNs, fragmentation of T cell and macrophage CNs, and disruption of inter-CN communication was associated with inferior outcomes. This study provides a framework for interrogating how complex biological processes, such as antitumoral immunity, occur through concerted actions of cells and spatial domains.
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•FFPE-CODEX multiplexed tissue imaging of 56 markers in 140 tissues of 35 CRC patients•Cellular neighborhoods reveal spatial organization of the tumor microenvironment•Altered organization of tumor and immune components in low- versus high-risk patients•Local enrichment of PD-1+CD4+ T cells correlates with survival in high-risk patients
A multiplexed tissue imaging and computational analysis framework applied to colorectal cancer allows interrogation of how spatial organization of the immune tumor microenvironment is linked to clinical outcomes.
Retrieving high-content gene-expression information while retaining three-dimensional (3D) positional anatomy at cellular resolution has been difficult, limiting integrative understanding of ...structure and function in complex biological tissues. We developed and applied a technology for 3D intact-tissue RNA sequencing, termed STARmap (spatially-resolved transcript amplicon readout mapping), which integrates hydrogel-tissue chemistry, targeted signal amplification, and in situ sequencing. The capabilities of STARmap were tested by mapping 160 to 1020 genes simultaneously in sections of mouse brain at single-cell resolution with high efficiency, accuracy, and reproducibility. Moving to thick tissue blocks, we observed a molecularly defined gradient distribution of excitatory-neuron subtypes across cubic millimeter-scale volumes (>30,000 cells) and a short-range 3D self-clustering in many inhibitory-neuron subtypes that could be identified and described with 3D STARmap.
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