Fig. 2

Profiling of the immune response to SCI in humanised mice. A Experimental timeline. huNSG-SGM3 mice were subjected to either laminectomy (sham), spinal cord injury (SCI), or no surgery (naïve controls) at 15 weeks post-engraftment and then sacrificed 7 days later. B Left: engraftment efficiency at 8- (n = 21; 7♀, 14♂) and 16-weeks post-engraftment (study endpoint; n = 7; 3♀, 4♂). Data points show individual animals, along with group means and standard error of the mean (SEM); unpaired t-test; ns, not significant. Right: Temporal change in engraftment efficiency for individual mice. Lines highlight the direction of change in engraftment efficiency over time. C Representative immunofluorescent images showing huCD45 + cells (red; A647) within the different areas of the lesion (i-iii in spinal cord cartoon) in huNSG-SGM3 mice with SCI (7dpi; scale bar is 20 μm); staining for glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP) is shown in green (A488) and cell nuclei are cyan. Arrows indicate huCD45 + cells. D Experimental workflow for single cell RNA sequencing (scRNAseq) experiments. huCD45+ cells were isolated by fluorescence activated cell sorting (FACS) from the blood and/or spinal cord for scRNAseq. E Heatmap showing the top-10 gene markers for each identified cell type; colour gradient shows the scaled expression for each cluster marker (centered data divided by the standard deviation). F UMAP of all immune cells collected and sequenced from blood and spinal cord samples. Cells were classified into 11 cell types/subsets based on marker expression. G MetaCell plot of all immune cells, coloured by cell type and subset