Investigating Cellular Trajectories in the Severity of COVID-19 and Their Transcriptional Programs Using Machine Learning Approaches

Jeong, Hyun-Hwan; Jia, Johnathan; Dai, Yulin; Simon, Lukas M.; Zhao, Zhongming

Single-cell RNA sequencing of the bronchoalveolar lavage fluid (BALF) samples from COVID-19 patients has enabled us to examine gene expression changes of human tissue in response to the SARS-CoV-2 virus infection. However, the underlying mechanisms of COVID-19 pathogenesis at single-cell resolution, its transcriptional drivers, and dynamics require further investigation. In this study, we applied machine learning algorithms to infer the trajectories of cellular changes and identify their transcriptional programs. Our study generated cellular trajectories that show the COVID-19 pathogenesis of healthy-to-moderate and healthy-to-severe on macrophages and T cells, and we observed more diverse trajectories in macrophages compared to T cells. Furthermore, our deep-learning algorithm DrivAER identified several pathways (e.g., xenobiotic pathway and complement pathway) and transcription factors (e.g., MITF and GATA3) that could be potential drivers of the transcriptomic changes for COVID-19 pathogenesis and the markers of the COVID-19 severity. Moreover, macrophages-related functions corresponded more to the disease severity compared to T cells-related functions. Our findings more proficiently dissected the transcriptomic changes leading to the severity of a COVID-19 infection.