Immune Cell Profiling of COVID-19 Patients in the Recovery Stage by Single-Cell Sequencing

Wen Wen; Wenru Su; Hao Tang; Wenqing Le; Xiaopeng Zhang; Yingfeng Zheng; XiuXing Liu; Lihui Xie; Jianmin Li; Jinguo Ye; Xiuliang Cui; Yushan Miao; Depeng Wang; Jiantao Dong; Chuan-Le Xiao; Wei Chen; Hongyang Wang

Here, we applied single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) to comprehensively characterize the changes in peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) from 10 COVID-19 patients. Our study depicts a high-resolution transcriptome landscape of blood immune cell subsets during the recovery stage of COVID-19. It reveals that, compared to that in the healthy controls (HCs), monocytes containing high inflammatory gene expression and IL1β + subsets predominated, whereas CD4 + T cells decreased remarkably in patients in the early recovery stage of COVID-19. We found that T and B cell clones were highly expanded during the recovery stage in COVID-19 patients. Furthermore, several specific BCR changes in COVID-19 patients during the recovery stage may be helpful for vaccine and antibody production.