RRC ID 83903
Author Saunders LM, Srivatsan SR, Duran M, Dorrity MW, Ewing B, Linbo TH, Shendure J, Raible DW, Moens CB, Kimelman D, Trapnell C.
Title Embryo-scale reverse genetics at single-cell resolution.
Journal Nature
Abstract The maturation of single-cell transcriptomic technologies has facilitated the generation of comprehensive cellular atlases from whole embryos1-4. A majority of these data, however, has been collected from wild-type embryos without an appreciation for the latent variation that is present in development. Here we present the 'zebrafish single-cell atlas of perturbed embryos': single-cell transcriptomic data from 1,812 individually resolved developing zebrafish embryos, encompassing 19 timepoints, 23 genetic perturbations and a total of 3.2 million cells. The high degree of replication in our study (eight or more embryos per condition) enables us to estimate the variance in cell type abundance organism-wide and to detect perturbation-dependent deviance in cell type composition relative to wild-type embryos. Our approach is sensitive to rare cell types, resolving developmental trajectories and genetic dependencies in the cranial ganglia neurons, a cell population that comprises less than 1% of the embryo. Additionally, time-series profiling of individual mutants identified a group of brachyury-independent cells with strikingly similar transcriptomes to notochord sheath cells, leading to new hypotheses about early origins of the skull. We anticipate that standardized collection of high-resolution, organism-scale single-cell data from large numbers of individual embryos will enable mapping of the genetic dependencies of zebrafish cell types, while also addressing longstanding challenges in developmental genetics, including the cellular and transcriptional plasticity underlying phenotypic diversity across individuals.
Volume 623(7988)
Pages 782-791
Published 2023-11-1
DOI 10.1038/s41586-023-06720-2
PII 10.1038/s41586-023-06720-2
PMID 37968389
PMC PMC10665197
MeSH Animals Brachyury Protein Embryo, Mammalian* / embryology Embryo, Mammalian* / metabolism Gene Expression Profiling Gene Expression Regulation, Developmental Mutation Notochord / cytology Notochord / embryology Reverse Genetics* / methods Single-Cell Analysis* / methods Transcriptome / genetics Zebrafish* / embryology Zebrafish* / genetics
IF 42.779
Resource
Zebrafish Tg(CM-isl1:GFP)rw0