The authors first complete single-cell transcriptomic analysis on seven middle-aged healthy dogs of varying breeds and genders to develop a comprehensive reference for canine leukocytes. Then they apply the reference to investigate how leukocyte abundances and transcriptomes are altered in ten dogs with spontaneously arising osteosarcoma. They isolated circulating leukocytes from 6 male and 4 female middle-aged tumor bearing dogs diagnosed with osteosarcoma (OS). The cells obtained from the cancer burdened dogs were integrated with the 7 healthy samples to obtain a complete dataset of 74,067 cells. They identified 46 unique clusters with the major immune cell types apparent. You can see the UMAP result of healthy samples (upper) and OS samples (below), and you can search by gene names to see the expression profile of each gene in different cell clusters.
This work was published in Frontiers in Immunology at 2023 by Dylan et al. (https://doi.org/10.3389/fimmu.2023.1162700).
