Single-cell RNA expression profiling of ACE2, the putative receptor of Wuhan 2019-nCoV, in the nasal tissue

CHAO WU; Shufa Zheng; Yu Chen; Min Zheng

We performed unsupervised graph-based clustering (Seurat version 3.1.4) on the single-cell RNA-Seq data of the nasal brushing, bronchial biopsy, turbinate, and the lung tissue of the Asian donor. We visualized the data using t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (tSNE) (Figure 1 ). Yu Zhao et al. use SFTPC as the marker of AT2. We didn't detect SFTPC expression in the single-cell RNA-Seq data of nasal brushing, bronchial biopsy, turbinate. We found that KRT8 shows a wide expression in the cells of nasal brushing, bronchial biopsy, turbinate, and the lung tissue of the Asian donor. We used KRT8 as the marker of apical cells, and KRT5 as the marker of basal cells. We found KRT8 and SFTPC both mark AT2 in cells of the lung tissue of the Asian donor. We count the number of detected cells, cells with ACE2 expression, cells with KRT8 expression, and cells with both ACE2 expression and KRT8 expression in the single-cell RNA-Seq data of the nasal brushing, bronchial biopsy, turbinate and the lung tissue of the Asian donor (Table 1) . We found that about 3.2% and 2.1% of KRT8-expressing cells in the nasal brushing and turbinate samples show ACE2 expression, which is comparable to the percent of KRT8-expressing cells in the Asian donor having ACE2 expression.