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REVIEW article
Front. Mol. Biosci.
Sec. Molecular Diagnostics and Therapeutics
Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fmolb.2025.1513993
This article is part of the Research Topic Crosstalk between Metabolism and Immunity View all 4 articles
Single-cell RNA sequencing advances in revealing the development and progression of MASH: the identifications and interactions of nonparenchymal cells
Provisionally accepted- 1 Department of Endocrinology, Shenzhen Hospital, Peking University, Shenzhen, Beijing Municipality, China
- 2 Center for Energy Metabolism and Reproduction, Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen, China
- 3 Center for Cancer Immunology, Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen, China
- 4 Shenzhen College of Advanced Technology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, shenzhen, China
Developing drugs for the treatment of Metabolic Associated Steatohepatitis (MASH) has always been a significant challenge. Researchers have been dedicated to exploring drugs and therapeutic strategies to alleviate disease progression, but treatments remain limited. This is partly due to the complexity of the pathophysiological processes, and inadequate knowledge of the cellular and molecular mechanisms in MASH. Especially, the liver non-parenchymal cells (NPCs) like Kupffer cells, hepatic stellate cells and sinusoidal endothelial cells which play critical roles in live function, immune responses, fibrosis and disease progression. Deciphering how these cells function in MASH, would help understand the pathophysiological processes and find potential drug targets. In recent years, new technologies have been developed for single-cell transcriptomic sequencing, making cell-specific transcriptome profiling a reality in healthy and diseased livers. In this review, we discussed how the use of single-cell transcriptomic sequencing provided us with an in-depth understanding of the heterogeneous, cellular interactions among nonparenchymal cells and tried to highlight recent discoveries in MASH by this technology. It is hoped that the summarized features and markers of various subclusters in this review could provide a technical reference for further experiments and a theoretical basis for clinical applications.
Keywords: MAFLD, MASH, single-cell sequencing, macrophages, hepatic sinusoidal endothelial, Hepatic Stellate Cells, NAFLD, NASH
Received: 19 Oct 2024; Accepted: 05 Mar 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Ning, Lu, Liang and Ren. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Dong Liang, Center for Energy Metabolism and Reproduction, Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen, China
Pei-Gen Ren, Center for Cancer Immunology, Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen, China
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