Over a million studies have highlighted the central role of cytokines in immune function, yet we never had a comprehensive view of how every immune cell type responds to every cytokine. The large number of immune cell types and cytokines and complex cellular responses make it challenging.
In the recent Nature paper “Dictionary of immune responses to cytokines at single-cell resolution” (Cui et al., Nature 2023), the Immune Dictionary was created.
This is a large-scale compendium of single-cell transcriptomic profiles of more than 17 immune cell types in response to each of 86 cytokines (>1,400 cytokine–cell type combinations) in mouse lymph nodes in vivo. The dictionary revealed many immune cell responses to cytokines that were previously uncharacterized. Based on this dictionary, they developed companion software, Immune Response Enrichment Analysis (IREA), that allows any researcher to assess cytokine activities, immune cell polarization, and cytokine networks from gene expression data. The dictionary generates new hypotheses for cytokine functions, illuminates pleiotropic effects of cytokines, expands our knowledge of activation states of each immune cell type, and provides a framework to deduce the roles of specific cytokines and cell–cell communication networks in any immune response.
Publication: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06816-9
Immune Dictionary and IREA web portal: http://www.immune-dictionary.org
Tweetorial: https://twitter.com/AngCuiPhD/status/1732562360915632462