Fig. 1.
CD8+ T cells are the predominant expanded cell type in AA skin. (A) Schematic of scRNAseq experiment. We harvested full-thickness skin from three skin-grafted C3H/HeJ mice with AA and three UG controls and isolated live CD45+ immune cells for scRNAseq (10× Genomics). Individual cDNA libraries were prepared for each sample prior to sequencing. (B) UMAP of scRNAseq data from (A) split across disease condition. Unsupervised clustering of 20,321 cells (9,102 UG; 11,219 AA) after quality control and CCA-based alignment uncovered 15 distinct populations. Note the marked increase in T cell infiltration in AA skin, especially that of CD8+ T cells. (C) Stacked bar plot showing distribution of each cluster relative to the total number of cells per disease condition. (D) Percentage of T cells relative to the total number of sequenced cells, averaged across the three replicates for each disease condition, showing a statistically significant (P = 0.002) increase in T cells in AA skin. Error bars represent SD. (E) Percentage of specific T cell subsets relative to the total number of sequenced cells, averaged across the three replicates for each disease condition, showing a statistically significant (P = 0.00089) increase in CD8+ T cells in AA skin. Error bars represent SD. DCs, dendritic cells; ILC, innate lymphoid cells; Mac, macrophages; Mono, Monocytes; NK, natural killer cells; NKT, natural killer T cells; Treg, regulatory T cells. Significance is indicated as follows: *P < 0.05; **P < 0.01; ***P < 0.001.