Quantum Barcoding Bridges High-Dimensional Immune Phenotyping with Signaling Responses across Species

Quantum Barcoding matched mass cytometry to produce computationally fused immune profiles with 174 protein features across human and rhesus macaque blood, enabling cross-species signaling comparisons.

• Why it matters: Cross-species immune profiling is constrained by limited marker panels and antibody cross-reactivity, limiting high-dimensional, comparable phenotyping and signaling readouts.
• What they did: The study benchmarked Quantum Barcoding (QBC), a split-pool oligo-antibody assay, against mass cytometry in human and rhesus macaque blood, then integrated separately measured cells using MARIO. It assessed population-frequency concordance and lineage-resolved signaling conservation, including GM-CSF-driven pSTAT5 responses.
• The result: Concordance was higher in humans (Pearson r = 0.92) than rhesus macaques (r = 0.55), and B-cell signaling conservation was linked across species (Spearman rho = 0.70). GM-CSF increased pSTAT5 in human monocytes and dendritic populations and rhesus dendritic cells, and network inference found convergent pSTAT5-centered connectivity changes, including pSTAT1-edge reversal and gained pSTAT3/pERK coupling.

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