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

We found that COVID-19 patients had a greater abundance of CD14 ++ IL1β + monocytes and IFN-activated monocytes than the HCs (Fig. 3D-F ). Genes associated with CD14 ++ inflammatory monocytes (M1) had high expression levels of inflammatory genes such as IL1β, JUN, FOS, JUNB, and KLF6; chemokines, CCL4, CXCR4; and interferon-stimulated genes, IFRD1, IRF1, and IFI6. In contrast, anti-inflammatory genes associated with CD14 ++ monocytes (M1) were downregulated in COVID-19 patients relative to that in the HCs (Fig. 3D, E) . Notably, IL1β expression values in a UMAP with simultaneous contrast indicated that IL1β was upregulated in the ERS group and decreased in the LRS patients (Fig. 3F) . This was also confirmed in the DC cluster of the ERS group compared to that of the HCs (Fig. S3A-B ). Next, we took the average of the inflammatory genes for each myeloid cell scRNA-seq subset in the COVID-19 patients versus that in the HCs (Fig. S3C) .