Natural killer (NK) cells are innate cytotoxic lymphoid cells (ILCs) involved in the killing of infected and tumor cells. Several NK cell subsets have been reported in humans, but their heterogeneity between tissues remains to be fully characterized. The inventors previously showed, by single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNAseq) in human and mouse NK cells from spleen and blood, that the two major subsets, NK1 and NK2, are similar in different organs and species. They report here the identification, at single-cell resolution, of three subpopulations of NK cells in human bone marrow and an additional adaptive cell-like NK population in some cytomegalovirus-seropositive individuals. Pseudotime analysis identified a minor subset of resident CD56bright NK cells, NK0 cells, as the precursor of both circulating CD56dim NK1-like NK cells and CD56bright NK2-like in the human bone marrow and spleen at steady state. Transcriptomic profiles of bone marrow NK cells from patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML), a bone marrow disease, showed a stress-induced repression of NK cell effector functions relative to healthy NK cells, thus highlighting the profound impact of the disease on NK cell heterogeneity. Finally, the inventors investigated the potential role of CD160 in AML disease development and progression further, by studying the clinical outcome of cancer patients. Survival was much higher in patients with CD160-high AML than in those with CD160-low cancer, suggesting that CD160 is an anti-tumor biomarker in AML.