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Psychological stress increases susceptibility to Staphylococcus aureus infection by the action of TGFβ to suppress immune acting fibroblasts [RNA-Seq]

GSE270713 Homo sapiens (human) Single-cell RNA-seq 36 samples Submitted 2025/05/29 Platform GPL24247Platform GPL24676
At a glance

Single-cell RNA-seq · human · 36 samples

What it is
Single-cell RNA-seqGene activity measured in thousands of individual cells, so cell types can be told apart. Read from the summary: GEO's own type field only says 'expression profiling by sequencing', so confirm it in the paper.
Organism
Homo sapiens (human)
Samples
36 samples: 12 conditions, mostly in triplicateGroups are read from the sample names, not from the paper. Check the list below.
Data you can get
A processed table (series matrix) and supplementary files from NCBI; the raw sequencing reads from ENA. Which of these hold counts depends on the study, so check the file list.
Paper
Psychological stress increases skin infection through the action of TGFβ to suppress immune-acting fibroblastsScience immunology · 2025
Summary (written by the submitters)
Psychological stress results in increased susceptibility to infection yet the mechanisms responsible for this major healthcare burden are incompletely understood. In mice, stress induced by restraint increases infection by Staphylococcus aureus while adrenalectomy or chemical inhibition of adrenergic signaling blocks this response. Single-cell transcriptomics and lipidomic profiling of the skin after stress reveal fibroblasts undergoing adipogenesis are the major cell type responding to stress.
Read the full summary ↓
Fibroblasts are critical to the increase in infection as adrenaline inhibits fibroblast Camp expression and bacterial killing, and stress did not increase infection in mice that lack Camp in fibroblasts. The suppression of the antimicrobial function of Camp in fibroblasts occurs due to activation of TGFβ signaling and is critical to the capacity of stress to increase susceptibility to infection since treatment of mice with a neutralizing TGFβ antibody or a TGFβ receptor inhibitor restores expression of Camp and alleviates increased susceptibility to infection. These data show that susceptibility to infection after psychological stress is due to a brain-skin axis that induces TGFβ and subsequently inhibits host defense by immune acting fibroblasts in the dermis. This identifies TGFβ as an unexpected target that can ameliorate increased bacterial infections associated with stress.
Published in
Psychological stress increases skin infection through the action of TGFβ to suppress immune-acting fibroblasts
Chan H, Li F, Dokoshi T et al. · Science immunology 2025 · PMID 40215323 · doi:10.1126/sciimmunol.ads0519
This dataset
Open GSE270713 in finder → Find more RNA-seq datasets →
Download · which file do I need?

Direct links to NCBI and ENA, no account and no request form. Pick by what you want to do: take the small processed table to look, the supplementary files to re-analyse, or the original raw data to start over.

1 · Just have a look

Processed table

The series matrix: one table of values per sample as the submitters processed it. The smallest download, and it opens in Excel or R. Start here to see what the data look like.

Series matrix ↓
2 · Re-analyse it

Supplementary files

The count tables and other files the authors uploaded. Take only the samples you need, or the whole study as GSE270713_RAW.tar (it can run to tens of gigabytes).

All supplementary files ↗ Whole study · RAW.tar ↓
3 · Start from the raw reads

Raw sequencing reads

The original FASTQ files, straight from the sequencer, held at ENA. Large, and you align them yourself, so only choose this if you need to re-process the study from scratch.

Raw reads on ENA ↗

What the files usually look like: Single-cell studies usually ship their counts as 10x files (matrix.mtx, barcodes.tsv, features.tsv), an .h5 file, or an .rds / .h5ad object that Seurat or Scanpy can open. Look for those among the supplementary files.

Also filed as BioProject PRJNA1128066 and SRA study SRP516031. Searching any of these in the dataset finder brings you back here.

NCBI GEO page ↗ Paper (PMID 40215323) ↗
Study design
12 conditions, mostly in triplicate
mdFB, Control, Day 2, triplicate sample ×3 mdFB, Adipocyte differentiation medium (ADM) … ×3 Sham_SA infection, Day 2, triplicate sample ×3 Sham_SA infection with stress, Day 2, triplic… ×3 ADX_SA infection, Day 2, triplicate sample ×3 ADX_SA infection with stress, Day 2, triplica… ×3 HPAd, Control, Day 2, triplicate sample ×3 HPAd, Adipocyte differentiation medium (ADM) … ×3 +8 more

Supports a between-group comparison across 32 samples.

How we read this: 12 replicated groups read from 36 sample titles; they account for 32 of them. These groups are guessed from the sample names, not taken from the paper, so check them against the sample list below before relying on them.

Samples in this study
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