Comprehensive immune profile changes to human interferon stimulation in normal and HBV-infected conditions in a humanized mouse II
As IFNs do not directly act on the intracellular HBV viral genome, the intrahepatic microenvironment alteration is postulated to be vital for HBV functional cure, and its characteristics at the termination would be informative. We used scRNA-seq to analyze the intrahepatic immune cell population alliteration after 15-week PEG-IFNa2 treatment. Overall design: Immune cells isolated from the liver tissues of mock- and PEG-IFNa2-treated type I interferon receptor humanized mouse were subjected to single-cell sequencing Due to insufficient numbers, intrahepatic immune cells isolated from 2-3 mice in each group were pooled. We compiled genes express data from 8856 cells for clustering analysis and revealed eight main distinct large cell clusters visualized as Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection (UMAP) embedding, consisting of Lymphoid cells such as B, T, CD8+ T, CD4+ T, regulatory T, and myeloid cells such as natural killer (NK) cells, neutrophils, and macrophages