GSE202351
Tfam-deficiency mediated mitochondrial disorder affects Langerhans cell maintenance and function
Langerhans cells (LCs) are skin-resident professional antigen-presenting dendritic cells (DCs) to maintain skin homeostasis. The number and function of LCs are significantly reduced during the skin aging processes, which is closely related to the aging-associated skin disorders. However, the reasons underlying the changes of LC features with age are uncertain. Mitochondria are well known to be the main powerhouse to regulate cell fitness and function, and a decline in mitochondrial quality and activity was associated with normal aging and correlated with the development of a wide range of age-related diseases. So far, it is unknown if mitochondrial abnormality is involved in skin disorders by regulating LC homeostasis. The mitochondrial transcription factor A (Tfam) acts as a nuclear-encoded transcription factor and plays a critical role in mitochondrial stabilization. To explore the role of mitochondrial quality in LC homeostasis, we generated the mice with conditional deletion of Tfam in LC lineage. We found that Tfam-deficient LCs exhibits mitochondrial abnormality including morphology and membrane permeability of mitochondria, decreased cell number as well as maturation, whereas increased phagocytosis and inflammatory response of LCs. Interestingly, age-LCs from human skin have lower Tfam expression compared to young-LCs, and have the similar features with Tfam-deficient LCs analyzed by scRNA sequence (HRA000395). Thus, our data highlight that Tfam-mediated mitochondrial stability is essential for epidermal LC maintenance and function, which might be explain the states of increased susceptible to skin infections and rising incidence of cutaneous tumor in the elder. This is the first time to investigate the effect of mitochondria abnormality on LC homeostasis, which might be helpful for therapeutic interventions in aging-associated skin pathologies. Overall design: Comparative gene expression profiling analysis of RNA-seq data for Epidermal LCs from 4-week old wild type (WT) and CD11cCreTfamfl/fl mice