On September 12, 2023, Guanlin Wang, Young Investigator at the Institute of Metabolism and Integrative Biology, Fudan University, together with research teams led by Professor Hanjie Li (Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences), Professor Yuanfang Zhu (Bao’an Maternal and Child Health Hospital of Shenzhen), Professor Xueqing Wu (Shenzhen University) and Professor Florent Ginhoux (Shanghai Jiao Tong University), published an article entitled “An immune cell atlas reveals the dynamics of human macrophage specification during prenatal development” in Cell.

Macrophages are heterogeneous and play critical roles in development and disease, but their diversity, function, and specification remain inadequately understood during human development. We generated a single-cell RNA sequencing map of the dynamics of human macrophage specification from PCW 4–26 across 19 tissues. We identified a microglia-like population and a proangiogenic population in 15 macrophage subtypes. Microglia-like cells, molecularly and morphologically similar to microglia in the CNS, are present in the fetal epidermis, testicle, and heart. They are the major immune population in the early epidermis, exhibit a polarized distribution along the dorsal-lateral-ventral axis, and interact with neural crest cells, modulating their differentiation along the melanocytelineage. Through spatial and differentiation trajectory analysis, we also showed that proangiogenic macrophages are perivascular across fetal organs and likely yolk-sac-derived as microglia. Our study provides a comprehensive map of the heterogeneity and developmental dynamics of human macrophages and unravels their diverse functions during development.

Figure 1. Study overview. CD45⁺ cells were sorted from different organs for scRNA-seq.

Link: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2023.08.019