Single-cell transcriptome analysis identifies hub genes in Psoriatic Skin

Background: Psoriasis is a chronic, inflammatory skin disease that is common and relapses easily. Psoriasis could induce erythematous scaly plaques predominantly occurring on the scalp, knees, elbows, and other affected areas in human skin. Some previous studies had indicated the following features of the disease including abnormal proliferation and differentiation of keratinocytes drive the rapid accumulation of immature keratinocytes, which could result in multilayered silvery-white scales by detecting methods of histologically and psoriatic lesions. While the importance of keratinocyte proliferation in psoriasis development is well-documented, the specific functional subpopulations of epidermal keratinocytes associated with this disease remain enigmatic. Materials and Methods: We used the scRNA-seq data of GSE220116 from GEO database, which were included 11 pre-treatment lesional skin samples and 10 healthy volunteers’ skin samples, utilizing the 10× Genomics platform. The data was constituted of a total of 19,525 cells from 11 psoriasis pre-treatment lesional skin samples, and 11,920 cells from 10 control skin samples. By analysis of the data, we observed significant increases in keratinocytes and T-cells between psoriatic and healthy group respectively. Furthermore, we identified upregulated expression of specific secreted factors known to promote inflammatory responses. Additionally, we conducted a KEGG pathway enrichment analysis on these identified subsets. Results: Our study employed single-cell sequencing analysis and differential expression analysis to identify key genes between psoriasis and healthy group investigate its molecular mechanisms and associated signaling pathways in disease progression. This work indicated that the Keratinocytes and T cells were the main populations that differed between the psoriasis and healthy group. Then we utilize the methods of UMAP-based and t-SNE-based clustering, we found the expression of SPINK5 was the only expressed gene differential expressed genes (DEGs) in keratinocytes , T-cells and all top expressed genes in all cell types between psoriasis and healthy group. It could indicate that the SPINK5 could have potential functions against psoriasis. Conclusion: These findings provide the result indicate that the SPINK5 could be acted as the hub gene against psoriasis induced the inflammation and immune reaction. This knowledge opens new horizons for the development of innovative clinical treatment strategies for psoriasis in the future.