Airway Basal Cells in Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease: A Continuum or a Dead End?

• Published in: American journal of respiratory cell and molecular biology Vol. 65; no. 1; pp. 10 - 12
• Main Author: Shaykhiev, Renat
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York American Thoracic Society 01.07.2021
• Subjects: Airway management; Basal cells; Biopsy; Cell self-renewal; Cell surface; Cells; Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease; Flow cytometry; Gene expression; Keratin; Lung diseases; Nerve growth factor receptors; Obstructive lung disease; Progenitor cells; Respiratory tract; Surface markers
• ISSN: 1044-1549; 1535-4989; 1535-4989
• DOI: 10.1165/rcmb.2021-0150ED

Shaykhiev discusses the paper by Wijk et al. conducted a study in which gene expression and clonogenic function of BCs--indicative of their self-renewal ability--were assessed immediately after their isolation from airway biopsy samples of subjects with or without COPD. To isolate BCs, they employed a FACS sorting strategy, which selects cells expressing NGFR (nerve growth factor receptor), a cell-surface marker of airway BCs, and also exhibits high forward scatter profile. Targeted gene expression analysis of individual isolated cells confirmed that all of them expressed the classical BC markers, keratin 5 and tumor protein TP63. About a third of BCs isolated from healthy airways expressed markers of secretory (SCGB1A1) or ciliated (FOXJ1) lineages, which likely represent committed progenitors. This observation is in line with recent single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) studies that identified airway BC subsets with transitional gene expression patterns indicative of early differentiation.