Adipose tissue in health and disease through the lens of its building blocks

Background Highly specialized cells work in synergy forming tissues to perform functions required for the survival of organisms. Understanding this tissue-specific cellular heterogeneity and homeostasis is essential to comprehend the development of diseases within the tissue and also for developing regenerative therapies. Cellular subpopulations in the adipose tissue have been related to disease development, but efforts towards characterizing the adipose tissue cell type composition are limited due to lack of robust cell surface markers, limited access to tissue samples, and the labor-intensive process required to identify them.

Results We propose a framework, identifying cellular heterogeneity while providing state-of-the-art cellular markers for each cell type present in tissues using transcriptomics level analysis. We validate our approach with an independent dataset and present the most comprehensive study of adipose tissue cell type composition to date, determining the relative amounts of 21 different cell types in 779 adipose tissue samples detailing differences across four adipose tissue depots, between genders, across ranges of BMI and in different stages of type-2 diabetes. We also highlight the heterogeneity in reported marker-based studies of adipose tissue cell type composition and provide novel cellular markers to distinguish different cell types within the adipose tissue.

Conclusions Our study provides a systematic framework for studying cell type composition in a given tissue and valuable insights into adipose tissue cell type heterogeneity in health and disease.