Cell type composition and circuit organization of clonally related excitatory neurons in the juvenile mouse neocortex
- University of California, San Francisco, United States
- Baylor College of Medicine, United States
- University of Tübingen, Germany
- Karolinska Institutet, Sweden
Abstract
Clones of excitatory neurons derived from a common progenitor have been proposed to serve as elementary information processing modules in the neocortex. To characterize the cell types and circuit diagram of clonally related neurons, we performed multi-cell patch clamp recordings and Patch-seq on neurons derived from Nestin-positive progenitors labeled by tamoxifen induction at embryonic day 10.5. The resulting clones are derived from two radial glia on average, span cortical layers 2-6, and are composed of a random sampling of transcriptomic cell types. We find an interaction between shared lineage and connectivity: related neurons are more likely to be connected vertically across cortical layers, but not laterally within the same layer. These findings challenge the view that related neurons show uniformly increased connectivity and suggest that integration of vertical intra-clonal input with lateral inter-clonal input may represent a developmentally programmed connectivity motif supporting the emergence of functional circuits.
Data availability
Sequencing data have been deposited in GEO under accession code GSE140946. All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in the manuscript and supporting files. Source data files have been provided for Figures 1, 2, 3 and 4. The source data provided for Figure 4 also apply to Figure 5 and Table 1.
-
Cell type composition and circuit organization of neocortical radial clonesNCBI Gene Expression Omnibus, GSE140946.
Article and author information
Author details
Kimberley F Tolias
Andreas Savas Tolias
Funding
Baylor College of Medicine (Optical Imaging and Vital Microscopy Core)
- Andreas Savas Tolias
Baylor College of Medicine (Faculty start-up fund)
- Xialong Jiang
National Institutes of Health (F30MH095440,T32GM007330)
- Cathryn R Cadwell
National Institutes of Health (F30MH112312)
- Paul G Fahey
Baylor Research Advocates for Student Scientists (BRASS Scholar Award)
- Cathryn R Cadwell
- Paul G Fahey
National Institutes of Health (R01MH103108,R01DA028525,DP1EY023176,P30EY002520,T32EY07001,DP1OD008301)
- Andreas Savas Tolias
National Science Foundation (707359)
- Andreas Savas Tolias
Svenska Forskningsrådet Formas
- Rickard Sandberg
Vallee Foundation
- Rickard Sandberg
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (EXC 2064,BE5601/4-1)
- Philipp Berens
Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (FKZ 01GQ1601)
- Philipp Berens
McKnight Foundation (McKnight Scholar Award)
- Andreas Savas Tolias
Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation (Young Investigator Award)
- Andreas Savas Tolias
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: This study was performed in strict accordance with the recommendations in the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals of the National Institutes of Health. All of the animals were handled according to an approved institutional animal care and use committee (IACUC) protocol of Baylor College of Medicine (protocol # AN-4703). Every effort was made to minimize suffering.
Copyright
© 2020, Cadwell 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.
Metrics
-
- 4,172
- views
-
- 632
- downloads
-
- 43
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Cell type composition and circuit organization of clonally related excitatory neurons in the juvenile mouse neocortex
eLife 9:e52951.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.52951
Further reading
-
- Developmental Biology
- Neuroscience
We established a volumetric trans-scale imaging system with an ultra-large field-of-view (FOV) that enables simultaneous observation of millions of cellular dynamics in centimeter-wide three-dimensional (3D) tissues and embryos. Using a custom-made giant lens system with a magnification of ×2 and a numerical aperture (NA) of 0.25, and a CMOS camera with more than 100 megapixels, we built a trans-scale scope AMATERAS-2, and realized fluorescence imaging with a transverse spatial resolution of approximately 1.1 µm across an FOV of approximately 1.5×1.0 cm2. The 3D resolving capability was realized through a combination of optical and computational sectioning techniques tailored for our low-power imaging system. We applied the imaging technique to 1.2 cm-wide section of mouse brain, and successfully observed various regions of the brain with sub-cellular resolution in a single FOV. We also performed time-lapse imaging of a 1-cm-wide vascular network during quail embryo development for over 24 hr, visualizing the movement of over 4.0×105 vascular endothelial cells and quantitatively analyzing their dynamics. Our results demonstrate the potential of this technique in accelerating production of comprehensive reference maps of all cells in organisms and tissues, which contributes to understanding developmental processes, brain functions, and pathogenesis of disease, as well as high-throughput quality check of tissues used for transplantation medicine.
-
- Developmental Biology
- Genetics and Genomics
Smads and their transcription factor partners mediate the transcriptional responses of target cells to secreted ligands of the transforming growth factor-β (TGF-β) family, including those of the conserved bone morphogenetic protein (BMP) family, yet only a small number of direct target genes have been well characterized. In C. elegans, the BMP2/4 ortholog DBL-1 regulates multiple biological functions, including body size, via a canonical receptor-Smad signaling cascade. Here, we identify functional binding sites for SMA-3/Smad and its transcriptional partner SMA-9/Schnurri based on ChIP-seq peaks (identified by modEncode) and expression differences of nearby genes identified from RNA-seq analysis of corresponding mutants. We found that SMA-3 and SMA-9 have both overlapping and unique target genes. At a genome-wide scale, SMA-3/Smad acts as a transcriptional activator, whereas SMA-9/Schnurri direct targets include both activated and repressed genes. Mutations in sma-9 partially suppress the small body size phenotype of sma-3, suggesting some level of antagonism between these factors and challenging the prevailing model for Schnurri function. Functional analysis of target genes revealed a novel role in body size for genes involved in one-carbon metabolism and in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) secretory pathway, including the disulfide reductase dpy-11. Our findings indicate that Smads and SMA-9/Schnurri have previously unappreciated complex genetic and genomic regulatory interactions that in turn regulate the secretion of extracellular components like collagen into the cuticle to mediate body size regulation.
