Universal recording of immune cell interactions in vivo

Immune cells rely on transient physical interactions with other immune and non-immune populations to regulate their function¹. To study these ‘kiss-and-run’ interactions directly in vivo, we previously developed LIPSTIC (labelling immune partnerships by SorTagging intercellular contacts)², an approach that uses enzymatic transfer of a labelled substrate between the molecular partners CD40L and CD40 to label interacting cells. Reliance on this pathway limited the use of LIPSTIC to measuring interactions between CD4⁺ T helper cells and antigen-presenting cells, however. Here we report the development of a universal version of LIPSTIC (uLIPSTIC), which can record physical interactions both among immune cells and between immune and non-immune populations irrespective of the receptors and ligands involved. We show that uLIPSTIC can be used, among other things, to monitor the priming of CD8⁺ T cells by dendritic cells, reveal the steady-state cellular partners of regulatory T cells and identify germinal centre-resident T follicular helper cells on the basis of their ability to interact cognately with germinal centre B cells. By coupling uLIPSTIC with single-cell transcriptomics, we build a catalogue of the immune populations that physically interact with intestinal epithelial cells at the steady state and profile the evolution of the interactome of lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus-specific CD8⁺ T cells in multiple organs following systemic infection. Thus, uLIPSTIC provides a broadly useful technology for measuring and understanding cell–cell interactions across multiple biological systems.