Single‑cell RNA sequencing of t(8;21) acute myeloid leukemia for risk prediction

Abstract

Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) of bone marrow or peripheral blood samples from patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) enables the characterization of heterogeneous malignant cells. A total of 87 cells from two patients with t(8;21) AML were analyzed using scRNA-seq. Clustering methods were used to separate leukemia cells into different sub-populations, and the expression patterns of specific marker genes were used to annotate these populations. Among the 31 differentially expressed genes in the cells of a patient who relapsed after hematopoietic stem cell transplantation, 13 genes were identified to be associated with leukemia. Furthermore, three genes, namely AT-rich interaction domain 2, lysine methyltransferase 2A and synaptotagmin binding cytoplasmic RNA interacting protein were validated as possible prognostic biomarkers using two bulk expression datasets. Taking advantage of scRNA-seq, the results of the present study may provide clinicians with several possible biomarkers to predict the prognostic outcomes of t(8;21) AML.

The current landscape of single-cell transcriptomics for cancer immunotherapy

“…One particularly studied blood cancer using scRNA-seq is acute myeloid leukemia (AML), a malignancy derived from myeloid hemopoietic cells that has a high relapse rate and overall poor outcome following standard chemotherapy regimens ( Yilmaz et al, 2019 ). Xiong et al (2020) used the Fluidigm C1 platform to study at the single-cell level the bone marrow of two AML patients. Of the 31 differentially expressed genes in the AML cells of the patient who relapsed after hematopoietic stem cell transplantation, the authors found three cancer genes ( ARID2 , MLL , and SYNCRIP ) that served as prognostic biomarkers in a validation cohort of 52 AML patients analyzed by bulk RNA-seq.…”