Comprehensive transcriptome analysis of cochlear spiral ganglion neurons at multiple ages
Abstract
Inner ear cochlear spiral ganglion neurons (SGNs) transmit auditory information to the brainstem. Recent single cell RNA-Seq studies have revealed heterogeneities within SGNs. Nonetheless, much remains unknown about the transcriptome of SGNs, especially which genes are specifically expressed in SGNs. To address these questions we needed a deeper and broader gene coverage than that in previous studies. We performed bulk RNA-Seq on mouse SGNs at five ages, and on two reference cell types (hair cells and glia). Their transcriptome comparison identified genes previously unknown to be specifically expressed in SGNs. To validate our dataset and provide useful genetic tools for this research field, we generated two knockin mouse strains: Scrt2-P2A-tdTomato and Celf4-3xHA-P2A-iCreER-T2A-EGFP. Our comprehensive analysis confirmed the SGN-selective expression of the candidate genes, testifying to the quality of our transcriptome data. These two mouse strains can be used to temporally label SGNs or to sort them.
Data availability
Sequencing data have been deposited in GEO under accession codes GSE132925.
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RNA-Seq of mouse inner ear SGNs, HCs and GliasNCBI Gene Expression Omnibus, GSE132925.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Ministry of Science and Technology of the People's Republic of China (2017YFA0103901)
- Zhiyong Liu
Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDB32060100)
- Zhiyong Liu
National Natural Science Foundation of China (81771012)
- Zhiyong Liu
Shanghai Municipal Education Commission (2018SHZDZX05)
- Zhiyong Liu
Boehringer Ingelheim (DE811138149)
- Zhiyong Liu
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: All mice were bred and raised in SPF level animal rooms and animal procedures were performed according to guidelines (NA-032-2019) of the IACUC of Institute of Neuroscience (ION), Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Copyright
© 2020, Li et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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