Exploration of the heterogeneity and interaction of epithelial cells and NK/T-cells in Laryngeal Squamous Cell Carcinoma based on single-cell RNA sequencing data

OBJECTIVES: We aimed to explore the heterogeneity and differentiation trajectories of epithelial cells and NK/T-cells in Laryngeal Squamous Cell Carcinoma (LSCC). METHODS: We downloaded the GSE150321 data set containing LSCC01 and LSCC02 samples single cell RNA data from Gene Expression Omnibus. The UMAP analysis was performed to identify the cell subpopulations and cell locations of subpopulations. Seurat package was used to analyze the differential expression of genes. The function of differential expression genes was analyzed using DAVID database. The monocle2 package was used to analyze differentiation trajectories. We used the CellChat package to observe the signaling pathways and ligand–receptor pairs for epithelial cells and NK/T-cells. RESULTS: All the LSCC cells were divided into 16 subpopulation that included 7 epithelial cell subsets, 3 T-cell subsets. The function analysis indicated that epithelial cells and NK/T-cells mainly participated in different process, such as cell cycle, immune response, and cell migration. Then, the results of differentiation trajectory indicated that the ability of migration, and the activation of the immune system increases, while the ability of apoptosis, and glucose metabolic process decreases as pseudotime. Migration-related epithelial cells act on all T-cells via the CNTN2-CNTN2 ligand–receptor pair, which suggested that CNTN2 might be an important biomarker for regulating migration of epithelial cells. CONCLUSIONS: Our study characterized the heterogeneity of LSCC, which provided novel insights into LSCC and identified a new mechanism and target for clinical LSCC threapies. EVIDENCE: IV.