Single-Cell RNA-Seq Analysis Reveals the Tumor Microenvironment of Aldosterone-Producing Adenoma

Abstract

SUMMARYAldosterone adenoma (APA) as a common adrenocortical tumor, but the pathogenic mechanism of this disease is still unclear. In this study, we constructed a single-cell atlas to identify the important types and function of cells in the APA, and meantime the changes of cell functions in APA could also be detected using function enrichment analysis and time analysis, and the important cell types were confirmed through immunohistochemistry. We found that M1-type macrophages exhibited immune function inhibition, while PLAC8⁺CD8⁺T cells showed pro-inflammatory and cytotoxic functions decreasing. Moreover, we also found that a small of ZG cells in the time analysis possessed greater capacity in aldosterone synthesis and lower capacity to differentiate toward the zona fasciculata. The results in the research provided a new understanding of tumor microenvironment and the pathogenesis in aldosterone adenoma might attribute to the function change of CD8+ T cell and macrophage, as well as the ZG.

Funding Information: We thank for the grants supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No:81660075) and Postdoctoral Research Foundation of China (No:2017M612872) and the Opening Project of the Science Experiment Center, Guangxi (No. KFJJ2011-35), and research funding from Guangxi Provincial Education Office (No. 201202ZD025), and Open Project of Guangxi Key Laboratory of Medical Genetics and Genomics（No. GXGPMC201908).

Declaration of Interests: The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Ethics Approval Statement: The study was approved by the Institution Review Board from The First Affiliated Hospital of Guangxi Medical University. All patients provided written informed consent.

Keywords: aldosterone-producing adenoma, single-cell RNA sequencing, tumor microenvironment