Immune Cell-Related Genes in Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis Identified Using Transcriptomic and Single-Cell Sequencing Data

Juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA) is the most common chronic rheumatic disease in children. The heterogeneity of the disease can be investigated via single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) for its gap in the literature. Firstly, five types of immune cells (plasma cells, naive CD4 T cells, memory-activated CD4 T cells, eosinophils, and neutrophils) were significantly different between normal control (NC) and JIA samples. WGCNA was performed to identify genes that exhibited the highest correlation to differential immune cells. Then, 168 differentially expressed immune cell-related genes (DE-ICRGs) were identified by overlapping 13,706 genes identified by WGCNA and 286 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) between JIA and NC specimens. Next, four key genes, namely SOCS3, JUN, CLEC4C, and NFKBIA, were identified by a protein–protein interaction (PPI) network and three machine learning algorithms. The results of functional enrichment revealed that SOCS3, JUN, and NFKBIA were all associated with hallmark TNF-α signaling via NF-κB. In addition, cells in JIA samples were clustered into four groups (B cell, monocyte, NK cell, and T cell groups) by single-cell data analysis. CLEC4C and JUN exhibited the highest level of expression in B cells; NFKBIA and SOCS3 exhibited the highest level of expression in monocytes. Finally, real-time quantitative PCR (RT-qPCR) revealed that the expression of three key genes was consistent with that determined by differential analysis. Our study revealed four key genes with prognostic value for JIA. Our findings could have potential implications for JIA treatment and investigation.