4. Conclusion
SCS has revealed some important molecular mechanisms of airway physiology and pathogenesis of inflammatory diseases, cancer, and viral sensitization (summarized in Table 1 and Figure 1). It has also suggested new research perspectives for subsequent studies. Regarding inflammatory diseases of the upper and lower airways, the immune microenvironment, different immune cell subpopulations, and inflammatory heterogeneity mechanisms have been explored, and regulation of the immune response by the airway epithelial cell barrier has been described by application of SCS technology. With regards to airway viral infections and tumorigenesis, a large amount of data is now available to construct a cellular atlas that more comprehensively describes the cellular atlas of normal human lung tissue. RNA-Seq analysis studies are now advancing not only within single cells but also in a variety of cells and organs by using molecular information with high spatial and temporal precision. Of course, SCS has some limitations; for example the accurate transcription rates of RNA-Seq may not be consistent across all eukaryotic cells. Additionally, cell isolation procedures, including upstream and downstream processing, vary widely across studies, which limits reproducibility and affects the accuracy of reported datasets, often leading to over- or under-reporting of specific cell subpopulations. Future single-cell multi-omics technologies will be geared toward a broader range of airway diseases, and more accurately reveal the specific mechanisms of action of multiple cell types, and even subtypes in airway diseases. In addition, we believe that future efforts may also focus on applying SCS technology to a wide range of airway diseases, such as the correlation between AR and asthma development, NPC metastasis, disease recurrence, drug resistance, and phylogeny, in order to better understand the origins, treatments, and proper care of patients with airway diseases.
Table 1 Important findings regarding airway diseases achieved using SCS