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The shifting lipidomic landscape of blood monocytes and neutrophils during pneumonia
Alex R. Schuurman, Osoul Chouchane, Joe M. Butler, Hessel Peters-Sengers, Sebastiaan Joosten, Xanthe Brands, Bastiaan W. Haak, Natasja A. Otto, Fabrice Uhel, Augustijn Klarenbeek, Christine C.A. van Linge, Antoine van Kampen, Mia Pras-Raves, Michel van Weeghel, Marco van Eijk, Maria J. Ferraz, Daniël R. Faber, Alex de Vos, Brendon P. Scicluna, Frédéric M. Vaz, W. Joost Wiersinga, Tom van der Poll
Alex R. Schuurman, Osoul Chouchane, Joe M. Butler, Hessel Peters-Sengers, Sebastiaan Joosten, Xanthe Brands, Bastiaan W. Haak, Natasja A. Otto, Fabrice Uhel, Augustijn Klarenbeek, Christine C.A. van Linge, Antoine van Kampen, Mia Pras-Raves, Michel van Weeghel, Marco van Eijk, Maria J. Ferraz, Daniël R. Faber, Alex de Vos, Brendon P. Scicluna, Frédéric M. Vaz, W. Joost Wiersinga, Tom van der Poll
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Research Article Immunology Infectious disease

The shifting lipidomic landscape of blood monocytes and neutrophils during pneumonia

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Abstract

The lipidome of immune cells during infection has remained unexplored, although evidence of the importance of lipids in the context of immunity is mounting. In this study, we performed untargeted lipidomic analysis of blood monocytes and neutrophils from patients hospitalized for pneumonia and age- and sex-matched noninfectious control volunteers. We annotated 521 and 706 lipids in monocytes and neutrophils, respectively, which were normalized to an extensive set of internal standards per lipid class. The cellular lipidomes were profoundly altered in patients, with both common and distinct changes between the cell types. Changes involved every level of the cellular lipidome: differential lipid species, class-wide shifts, and altered saturation patterns. Overall, differential lipids were mainly less abundant in monocytes and more abundant in neutrophils from patients. One month after hospital admission, lipidomic changes were fully resolved in monocytes and partially in neutrophils. Integration of lipidomic and concurrently collected transcriptomic data highlighted altered sphingolipid metabolism in both cell types. Inhibition of ceramide and sphingosine-1-phosphate synthesis in healthy monocytes and neutrophils resulted in blunted cytokine responses upon stimulation with lipopolysaccharide. These data reveal major lipidomic remodeling in immune cells during infection, and link the cellular lipidome to immune functionality.

Authors

Alex R. Schuurman, Osoul Chouchane, Joe M. Butler, Hessel Peters-Sengers, Sebastiaan Joosten, Xanthe Brands, Bastiaan W. Haak, Natasja A. Otto, Fabrice Uhel, Augustijn Klarenbeek, Christine C.A. van Linge, Antoine van Kampen, Mia Pras-Raves, Michel van Weeghel, Marco van Eijk, Maria J. Ferraz, Daniël R. Faber, Alex de Vos, Brendon P. Scicluna, Frédéric M. Vaz, W. Joost Wiersinga, Tom van der Poll

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Figure 2

The lipid landscapes of monocytes and neutrophils during pneumonia.

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The lipid landscapes of monocytes and neutrophils during pneumonia.
(A) ...
(A) Monocyte lipid landscape plot, comparing patients with CAP at admission to controls. Each dot represents a lipid species, which are grouped per lipid class. The color of the dots indicates whether the lipid was significantly different (white) between the groups after Benjamini-Hochberg correction for all annotated lipids. The x axis shows the log2(fold change) between groups for each lipid. The y axis indicates the different lipid classes, with a ridge plot per lipid class that shows the distribution of the lipids within their respective classes. On the edges of the plot, stars denote class-wide significant differences as determined by Wilcoxon’s rank-sum test of aggregated values per class (a sum of all lipids per class per participant). All box-and-whisker plots of this analysis are shown in Supplemental Figure 1A. Stars on the left of the plot indicate a significant class-wide decrease, and stars on the right of the plot indicate a significant class-wide increase. A P value below 0.05 was considered significant. *P < 0.05, **P < 0.01, ***P < 0.001, ****P < 0.0001. (B) Identical to panel A, but here comparing CAP recovery monocytes to control monocytes. All box-and-whisker plots of this analysis are shown in Supplemental Figure 1B. (C) Identical to panel A, but here for neutrophils. All box-and-whisker plots of this analysis are shown in Supplemental Figure 2A. (D) Identical to panel B, but here for neutrophils. All box-and-whisker plots of this analysis are shown in Supplemental Figure 2B.

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