Resolving Immune Lineage and Cell-State Heterogeneity in Human PBMCs via Mass Spectrometry-Based Single-Cell Proteomics

Abstract

Single-cell proteomics (SCP) currently lacks validated benchmarking standards, and cell annotation often relies on transcriptomic proxies. Unsupervised clustering offers a proxy-free alternative, but its success depends on biological signal outweighing technical variation. In homogeneous samples this is achievable, but in heterogeneous populations, where closely related cell types differ only subtly, technical variation can dominate the clustering and obscure the biology needed for annotation. To address this, we developed an integrated experimental and computational pipeline for protein-level cell annotation and applied it to human PBMCs as an immune-cell test case. We isolated T cells, B cells, monocytes, and NK cells by negative-selection sorting to build a high-fidelity reference. In parallel, unsorted PBMCs from the same donor were processed on a cellenONE and acquired using label-free DIA on an Orbitrap Astral Zoom. Using the labeled reference dataset, we systematically benchmarked normalization, imputation, and clustering methods to assess their effect on cell-type separation. Unsupervised analysis resolved functional subpopulations within each lineage, and a probabilistic SCP classifier trained on these annotations identified the corresponding cell types and states in the unsorted PBMC fraction, validating the pipeline on unenriched, heterogeneous samples. Together, this work delivers an analytically benchmarked SCP workflow that resolves immune lineage and cell-state heterogeneity in human PBMCs and provides a classifier-ready, protein-level reference for immune-cell assignment.