Single-cell RNA sequencing unveils the shared and the distinct cytotoxic hallmarks of human TCRVδ1 and TCRVδ2 γδ T lymphocytes

γδ T lymphocytes represent ∼1% of human peripheral blood mononuclear cells and even more cells in most tissues of vertebrates. Although they have important anticancer functions, most current single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) studies do not identify γδ T lymphocytes because their transcriptomes at the single-cell level are unknown. Here we show that high-resolution clustering of large scRNA-seq datasets and a combination of gene signatures allow the specific detection of human γδ T lymphocytes and identification of their T cell receptor (TCR)Vδ1 and TCRVδ2 subsets in large datasets from complex cell mixtures. In t -distributed stochastic neighbor embedding plots from blood and tumor sa…