Functionally distinct plasmacytoid and conventional dendritic cells (pDC and cDC) shape innate and adaptive immunity. They are derived from common dendritic cell progenitors (CDPs) in the murine bone marrow, which give rise to CD11c+ MHCII− precursors with early commitment to DC subpopulations. In this study, we dissect pDC development from CDP into an ordered sequence of differentiation events by monitoring the expression of CD11c, MHC class II, Siglec H and CCR9 in CDP cultures by continuous single cell imaging and tracking. Analysis of CDP genealogies revealed a stepwise differentiation of CDPs into pDCs in a part of the CDP colonies. This developmental pathway involved an early CD11c+ SiglecH− pre-DC stage and a Siglec H+ CCR9low precursor stage, which was followed rapidly by upregulation of CCR9 indicating final pDC differentiation. In the majority of the remaining CDP pedigrees however the Siglec H+ CCR9low precursor state was maintained for several generations. Thus, although a fraction of CDPs transits through precursor stages rapidly to give rise to a first wave of pDCs, the majority of CDP progeny differentiate more slowly and give rise to longer lived precursor cells which are poised to differentiate on demand.

Plasmacytoid and conventional dendritic cells (pDC and cDC) are generated from progenitor cells in the bone marrow and commitment to pDCs or cDC subtypes may occur in earlier and later progenitor stages. Cells within the CD11c+MHCII−/loSiglec-H+CCR9lo DC precursor fraction of the mouse bone marrow generate both pDCs and cDCs. Here we investigate the heterogeneity and commitment of subsets in this compartment by single-cell transcriptomics and high-dimensional flow cytometry combined with cell fate analysis: Within the CD11c+MHCII−/loSiglec-H+CCR9lo DC precursor pool cells expressing high levels of Ly6D and lacking expression of transcription factor Zbtb46 contain CCR9loB220hi immediate pDC precursors and CCR9loB220lo (lo-lo) cells which still generate pDCs and cDCs in vitro and in vivo under steady state conditions. cDC-primed cells within the Ly6DhiZbtb46– lo-lo precursors rapidly upregulate Zbtb46 and pass through a Zbtb46+Ly6D+ intermediate stage before acquiring cDC phenotype after cell division. Type I IFN stimulation limits cDC and promotes pDC output from this precursor fraction by arresting cDC-primed cells in the Zbtb46+Ly6D+ stage preventing their expansion and differentiation into cDCs. Modulation of pDC versus cDC output from precursors by external factors may allow for adaptation of DC subset composition at later differentiation stages.

Motivation Recent imaging technologies allow for high-throughput tracking of cells as they migrate, divide, express fluorescent markers and change their morphology. The interpretation of these data requires unbiased, efficient statistical methods that model the dynamics of cell phenotypes. Results We introduce treeHFM, a probabilistic model which generalizes the theory of hidden Markov models to tree structured data. While accounting for the entire genealogy of a cell, treeHFM categorizes cells according to their primary phenotypic features. It models all relevant events in a cell’s life, including cell division, and thereby enables the analysis of event order and cell fate heterogeneity. Simulations show higher accuracy in predicting correct state labels when modeling the more complex, tree-shaped dependency of samples over standard HMM modeling. Applying treeHFM to time lapse images of hematopoietic progenitor cell differentiation, we demonstrate that progenitor cells undergo a well-ordered sequence of differentiation events. Availability and implementation The treeHFM is implemented in C++. We provide wrapper functions for the programming languages R (CRAN package, https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=treeHFM) and Matlab (available at Mathworks Central, http://se.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/57575-treehfml). Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Clinical observations in inflammatory bowel disease patients and experimental studies in rodents suggest that iron in the intestinal lumen derived from iron-rich food or oral iron supplementation could exacerbate inflammation and that iron depletion from the diet could be protective. To test the hypothesis that dietary iron reduction is protective against colitis development, the impact of iron reduction in the diet below 10 mg/kg on the course of CD4+ CD62L+ T cell transfer colitis was investigated in adult C57BL/6 mice. Weight loss as well as clinical and histological signs of inflammation were comparable between mice pretreated with semisynthetic diets with either < 10mg/kg iron content or supplemented with 180 mg/kg iron in the form of ferrous sulfate or hemin. Accumulation and activation of Ly6C high monocytes, changes in dendritic cell subset composition and induction of proinflammatory Th1/Th17 cells in the inflamed colon were not affected by the iron content of the diets. Thus, dietary iron reduction did not protect adult mice against severe intestinal inflammation in T cell transfer induced colitis.

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