Glioma is the most common primary malignant tumor in the brain, and even with standard treatments including surgical resection, radiotherapy, and chemotherapy, the long-term survival rate of patients remains unsatisfactory. Recurrence is one of the leading causes of death in glioma patients. The molecular mechanisms underlying glioma recurrence remain unclear.

During glioma recurrence, the molecular typing of the same patient often undergoes a switch from a non-mesenchymal subtype to a mesenchymal subtype, which is accompanied by a dynamic change in the tumor microenvironment, suggesting that glioma recurrence events are associated with an adaptive change in the immune microenvironment.

PRIMEG is the first single-cell database focused on the immune microenvironment of primary and recurrent gliomas, it allows users to easily perform tasks such as gene expression analysis and subpopulation annotation.

To construct this database, we first used the (BrainImmuneAtlas) as a reference dataset. Given that our focus is on immune cells, we excluded non-immune cell components from (Mei, Y., et al.’s study). We then annotated the processed single cell data using transfer learning and integrated and batch-corrected the two datasets with Harmony software. The resulting combined dataset includes approximately 130,000 high-quality immune cells from 35 glioma patients, comprising 13 primary and 22 recurrent gliomas, with 12 of the recurrent cases having received immunotherapy.