Single cell transcriptomics reveals opioid usage evokes widespread suppression of antiviral gene program
Date
2020-05-26
Authors
Karagiannis, Tanya
Cleary, John, Jr.
Gok, Busra
Henderson, Andrew J.
Martin, Nicholas
Yajima, Masanao
Nelson, Elliot
Cheng, Christine S.
Version
Published version
OA Version
Citation
Tanya Karagiannis, John Jr Cleary, Busra Gok, Andrew J Henderson, Nicholas Martin, Masanao Yajima, Elliot Nelson, Christine Cheng. 2020. "Single cell transcriptomics reveals opioid usage evokes widespread suppression of antiviral gene program." Nature Communications, Volume 11, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-16159-y
Abstract
Chronic opioid usage not only causes addiction behavior through the central nervous system, but also modulates the peripheral immune system. However, how opioid impacts the immune system is still barely characterized systematically. In order to understand the immune modulatory effect of opioids in an unbiased way, here we perform single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) of peripheral blood mononuclear cells from opioid-dependent individuals and controls to show that chronic opioid usage evokes widespread suppression of antiviral gene program in naive monocytes, as well as in multiple immune cell types upon stimulation with the pathogen component lipopolysaccharide. Furthermore, scRNA-seq reveals the same phenomenon after a short in vitro morphine treatment. These findings indicate that both acute and chronic opioid exposure may be harmful to our immune system by suppressing the antiviral gene program. Our results suggest that further characterization of the immune modulatory effects of opioid is critical to ensure the safety of clinical opioids.
Description
License
© The Author(s) 2020. Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.