Quantum Barcoding Bridges High-Dimensional Immune Phenotyping with Signaling Responses across Species
Cross-species immune profiling is limited by marker-panel size and antibody cross-reactivity. We benchmark Quantum Barcoding (QBC), a split-pool oligo-antibody assay, against mass cytometry in human and rhesus macaque blood and integrate separately measured cells using MARIO. The resulting computationally matched profiles carry 174 protein features. Population-frequency concordance was higher in humans (Pearson r = 0.92) than rhesus macaques (r = 0.55), and fusion resolved complementary lineage subsets. Unstimulated signaling conservation varied by lineage, with B-cell profiles correlated across species (Spearman ρ = 0.70). In the primary PBMC-reference analysis, GM-CSF increased pSTAT5 in human monocytes and dendritic populations and rhesus dendritic cells. Network inference identified convergent pSTAT5-centered connectivity changes in human monocytes and rhesus dendritic cells, including pSTAT1-edge reversal and gained pSTAT3/pERK coupling. These results connect broad surface phenotypes to inferred signaling organization while retaining species- and population-specific differences.
Authors
- Bokai Zhu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3599-9419)
- Sasha Anronikov (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7854-1809)
- Tze-Kai Tan (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7359-5303)
- Garry P. Nolan (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8862-9043)
- Frank J. Steemers
- Angelica Trejo
- Debbie L. L. Ho (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9799-4838)
- Marc‐Andrea Baertsch (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4000-6904)
- Agnieszka D. Czechowicz (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2909-2669)
- Hiromitsu Nakauchi (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9841-6973)
- David R. McIlwain (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2537-0273)
- Kevin Taylor
- Fan Zhang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4340-3435)
- Yunhao Bai (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2106-9747)
- Zachary Bjornson-Hooper (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0565-6805)
Institutions
- University of Nevada, Reno (US)
- California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (US)
- Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine (IN)
- BioLegend (United States) (US)
- Stanford Medicine (US)
- Stanford University (US)
Publication Details
- Journal
- bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
- Published
- 2026-11-02
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.10.31.763237
- Primary Topic
- Single-cell and spatial transcriptomics
- Type
- preprint